by Phil Rickman
He shuddered. He could almost smell it. Like the worst smell he’d ever known: when he was with the Met, called out to this house in Islington, this well-to-do suicide couple sitting naked on the sofa, holding hands, dead for three weeks, their heads fallen together. Pills and whisky and hundreds of flies and, on the coffee table, a photo album full of pictures of naked children.
He turned his back on High Knoll. The colours of the eastern sky were flat as a fresco; the dawn didn’t want him.
‘All seemed so meant, Bobby.’
Maiden hated himself. For her, the place was sacred. Why couldn’t he feel it?
But she wasn’t even looking at him any more.
‘Jesus God.’
A short, plump man was shambling and flapping towards them, down the Knoll.
‘Anderson?’ The man slipped and stumbled to his knees. ‘Is it you?’ He was grey-haired, late middle-age. Blinking up through heavy spectacles and a film of sweat. ‘It really is you?’
Andy reached for his hand and he stood up shakily. He was wearing baggy trousers and, bizarrely, a string vest. He clasped her hand to his chest, as if to make sure she was flesh and blood.
‘I’m sorry, Marcus. Unforeseen circumstances. Everything OK?’
‘No.’ Pulling from his trouser pocket a chequered handkerchief the size of a small pillowcase. ‘No, it’s fucking not.’
‘What’s happened? Marcus?’
‘I’m sorry, it …’ Snatching off his glasses, wiping his eyes. ‘Andy, oh God, I think she’s dying on me.’
They heard the noise before they saw her. It was suddenly sickeningly familiar to Andy. Like very loud snoring.
She ran ahead. About six feet back from the monument, there was a low, wooden stockade-type fence, several rows of barbed wire strung over the top. But the wire was cut and hanging like briars. They climbed over the fence.
‘You brought her up here, Marcus?’
‘Course not. She bloody well brought herself up. Oh God, can you do something?’
‘OK. Just … you know … keep calm.’
‘Woke up early, knew something was wrong. She’d come down in the night, let herself into the barn and pinched these … look.’ Holding up a pair of rubber-handled wire-cutters. ‘She cut the fence. Can you believe it?’
Close up, the burial chamber looked like a huge, collapsed crab, the shell split as if someone had stood on it. The old woman was laid out along the damaged capstone like …
… like a sacrifice … Andy smothered the image.
Mrs Willis wore a bright green coat and a yellow woollen scarf. Her hair in a tight, white bun. The volume of her breathing sounding perversely healthy.
‘It’s a stroke,’ Andy said. ‘No question. I’m sorry.’
‘What I feared. Fuck.’ Marcus sighed. ‘Blood pressure. Why wouldn’t she see someone? Someone else.’
The old woman’s head was pillowed by Marcus’s folded tweed jacket. Eyes were closed, mouth open, tongue protruding. Spittle and mucus all round her lips and her chin.
‘Do we get her down, that’s the question, Marcus? Maybe not. She up here when you found her?’
‘Just as she is now.’
‘OK.’ Andy removed Mrs Willis’s glasses, handed them to Marcus. ‘We need to get her in the recovery position. Don’t want her choking, swallowing her tongue. Bobby, can you take … this is Bobby Maiden, Marcus, patient of mine. Easy now. On her side.’
She stepped back. Bars of bright crimson had appeared in the eastern sky like the elements in an electric fire. Marcus said, ‘Look … Anderson … can’t you … you know … do anything?’
‘Limited amount you can do for a stroke. We need to keep her still. Then we need an ambulance.’
‘How the hell’s an ambulance going to get up here?’
‘That’s their problem. You just go back to the house and call them, I’ll stay here.’
‘When I said do anything …’ Marcus stood up. ‘Look, you know what I meant …’
The sun had come out, full and round and red.
‘Aye, I know.’ Andy went to sit behind the old woman in the shelter of the stones, wiped her mouth with a tissue. Took the white head gently between her hands. ‘Come on, Annie, you can hold on.’
The sun was turning to gold. Andy lifted her face to it, closing her eyes, waiting for the warmth to enter through the centre of her forehead, travel down through the chakras, until her hands were burning.
Marcus said, ‘What did you call her?’
‘Oh, Marcus,’ Andy said softly. ‘Old fool that y’are. You telling me it never occurred to you? The natural feeling she had for this place?’
‘Her name’s Joan,’ Marcus said stupidly. ‘Yes. Yes, it did occur to me, the way she just arrived, out of the blue. But Annie would be at least ninety. Mrs Willis can’t be that old. Can she?’
‘If she’d told you she was pushing ninety when she first came, would you have even considered taking her on?’
‘If she’d said she was Annie Davies, I’d have given her the Earth.’
‘You wouldnae have been able to keep it to yourself. Not for a day. And you’d’ve been on at her about it nonstop, questions, questions, questions. She didnae want the Earth.’
‘Oh my God.’ Marcus sat in his string vest, the sweat drying on his arms, staring down at Mrs Willis then up at the sun, his glasses misted. ‘She came here to die.’
‘She came to heal.’
‘No, I mean … here. She came up here to die at the Knoll. In the dawn.’
‘Aw, Marcus …’ Andy flexed her fingers in Mrs Willis’s hair. ‘How do we know what was going through her head?’
Andy’s hands still weren’t warm. She saw that Bobby Maiden had stepped between her and the sun. His face was deeply shadowed, but she could see the Sellotape was peeling away from his skin and he was holding the eyepatch in place.
He said, ‘How about we get her down from there?’
‘Bobby?’
‘Get her off the stone.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why.’
‘He doesn’t understand,’ Marcus said. ‘She loves this place.’
Bobby turned away from them and the stones. He was trembling. He walked away down the side of the Knoll.
Andy said, ‘Go phone for an ambulance, Marcus. Please?’
‘Yes, of course. Yes. Sorry.’ Marcus scrambled to his feet. Behind him, the sun was full and round and red, like a bubble of blood. He looked down at Mrs Willis. ‘Oh God.’
‘Marcus … go.’
He didn’t look back. When he reached the bottom of the mound, Andy called out, surprised at the tremor in her voice.
‘Bobby, come here. Talk to me.’
He came over reluctantly, not looking at the stone, left hand clamped over his eyepatch.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. What do I know?’
‘Never mind what you know,’ Andy said. ‘This is no the damn crown court, what do you feel?’
‘Cold. Sick.’ Gauze from the eyepatch was hanging down his cheek. ‘Frightened.’
‘Give me a hand with her. Take her legs.’
They lifted her. Bobby Maiden wouldn’t touch the stone. They laid her on the grass, Marcus’s jacket still under her head.
The sun was on the old woman’s face. Her eyes were open.
‘Annie? Can you hear what I’m saying?’
The eyes glared up at her.
‘Blink. Blink if you can hear me.’
Mrs Willis’s eyelids moved a fraction. Her skin was translucent, like tissue.
‘Annie,’ Andy said softly. ‘You feel better now? Off the stone? You feel better where you are?’
The blink was a long time coming, but when it came it was more pronounced, as if she’d been concentrating her energy.
Andy looked up at Bobby Maiden. Then across at the sun.
Her hands were feeling cold.
The sun was a lantern of hope, the land aglow. I
n the valley, the spire of St Mary’s church was tipped with gold. The birds were singing. And her hands felt cold.
Part Two
The world of prehistoric man was a complete one, wondrous and awful, and to survive in it he needed the protection that shamans could give.
Aubrey Burl, Rites of the Gods.
One of the least understood aspects of shamanic work is soul-retrieval, in which the shaman journeys to retrieve the soul of a sick person, who may be near to death. It relates to the phenomenon of ‘soul loss’ experienced by so many people today.
John Matthews, The Celtic Shaman: a handbook.
XVIII
Inside the body of the Old One, the Green Man awakes.
His muscles are stiffened and numbed after his long, foetal sleep. A rich, resinous, ancient life soaks his senses. It is a while before he understands where he is.
Above him, all around him, dawn birds sing. Birds rattling in the branches, their twittering lives come and gone in a heartbeat.
The Green Man feels the silence of the Old One. Who watched them build the church. Who stood here while the bones of the Barber-Surgeon were crushed beneath an Avebury megalith. Who thrived before Rufus died on Walter Tirel’s bolt in the New Forest.
And still lives.
Awaiting, perhaps, his third millennium.
Because of its size, the oak is more honoured, but the yew has more mystery. It is often referred to as the Death Tree because of its ubiquity in and around graveyards. Few realize that the yews were here long before the graves … that the churches were only built on these sites because they were already sacred, with the yew tree a symbol of that sanctity. Our oldest symbol of immortality.
The sign in this churchyard says, ALTHOUGH YEW TREES ARE DIFFICULT TO DATE, THIS VENERABLE SPECIMEN IS BELIEVED TO BE WELL OVER A THOUSAND YEARS OLD. THE WOODEN BENCH INSIDE THE HOLLOW TRUNK WILL SEAT UP TO TEN ADULTS SIDE BY SIDE.
Or one man sleeping.
It has been an experiment. How will a night in an ancient sacred tree differ from one atop a burial chamber or inside a circle of ritual stones?
The living yew might be expected to record stories, impressions and dreams in a different way from stone, and so it transpires. When he rises from the bench, the Green Man’s dream is still alive and vibrating in colours in his head. He sees clearly what he must do, as if in a film. As if it has already taken place.
Not in or around the yew, but inside the church.
While many centuries younger than the yew, the church is medieval. It stands a hundred yards outside this Worcestershire village, screened from the nearest houses — on an ugly council estate — by a dense copse. He tried the two doors last night and found both locked.
Someone, at some time, will have to let him in.
No-one has passed through in the night. No-one disturbed the Green Man where he lay, his back arched into the yew. He steps outside the tree now, stretches. Goes to release his morning water among the bushes.
And scarcely has he sheathed his tool than he hears the click of the wicket gate in the churchyard wall.
It is not yet seven a.m.
Never has a sacrifice been delivered so promptly.
The Green Man slides to his knees in the bushes. The visitor walks along the gravelled path and into his place in the Green Man’s living dream.
He is elderly, perhaps in his seventies, and slight of build with a bald, bony head and spectacles. He does not appear to be a clergyman, perhaps a verger or sexton. A ring of keys rattles loosely from his right hand.
Big keys. Church keys.
His keys to the afterlife.
The old man whistles as he enters the porch. The Green Man hears him fitting a key into the lock, jiggling it about.
He rises from the bushes.
He strides towards the porch, unarmed. No knife, no crossbow, no gun, no sharp-edged rock.
Just inside the porch is a stone baptismal font, the church’s oldest artefact.
At the end of his living dream, the bowl of the font is glistening with blood and bone and brains.
The verger whistles a tune from some old musical as the church door swings open.
XIX
Cindy Mars-Lewis made it three, possibly four, dead, plus one near-miss.
The near-miss was the boy motorcyclist in mid-Wales. The possible was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl found strangled, but not sexually assaulted, last January, in a bus shelter not far from Harold’s Stones at Trellech in Monmouthshire. This was still only a possible because the bus shelter, as Cindy had confirmed on a site visit, was on a very dubious alignment.
But, then — Cindy watched a boat far out in St Bride’s Bay — there was no evidence this murderer was a perfectionist.
Take the killing of the Midlands businessman on a bird-watching weekend in Wiltshire. The man had been savagely and inexplicably battered to death at the foot of a small hill, in the middle of field a couple of miles from Avebury.
He could almost sense them now, but it would be necessary to visit the actual murder site to be certain, and he was rather unwilling to do this so soon after the event, with police all over the place. Cindy had discovered he was not terribly popular with the police.
In particular, that mild-mannered family man, DCI Hatch, in Bournemouth. Cindy had telephoned Mrs Carlotta Capaldi from Liverpool where he was playing Third Witch in a rather downmarket touring production of the Scottish play, to discover that Hatch would appreciate a word with him.
‘I’ve had an inquiry about you, Mr Lewis. From the West Mercia Regional Crime Squad.’
Suspecting something of the kind, Cindy had waited until he was home before telephoning Bournemouth CID on his mobile.
‘What the holy hell are you playing at?’ Hatch demanded. ‘You just won’t take piss off for an answer, will you? You know there’s absolutely nothing to connect these killings — nothing admissible, anyway — and as for ringing bloody Crimewatch …’
A mistake, Cindy would agree. But the TV programme had run such a detailed reconstruction of the killing of the poor homeless boy in a shop doorway, showing precisely the location of the shop, close to the ancient market cross, and …
‘An impulse, I’m afraid, Chief Inspector. They did appeal for anyone with information.’
‘You didn’t have information. You wasted police time with a crackpot, semi-mystical theory which even I can’t entirely grasp, about so-called ley lines — which I understand the experts say do not even exist — linking a bunch of crimes which simply have nothing in common.’
‘With all respect, Peter,’ said Cindy, ‘that’s what they said about the Yorkshire Ripper.’
‘Not my area,’ Hatch snapped.
‘Oh, no, you don’t want to talk about that, do you? Why Sutcliffe kept walking in and out of the police net because he didn’t fit the profile? And because they were conned by a hoax tape into looking for the wrong type of man entirely.’
‘I don’t see where this-’
‘Still several unsolved murders out there, that might be down to him. And why were they rejected by the Ripper squad? Because they weren’t prostitutes, and the profile said the Yorkshire Ripper Only Kills Prostitutes.’
‘Mr Lewis, we are not looking for a serial killer.’
‘Psychos make their own patterns, see. Sometimes, the police are just so simplistic.’
‘That,’ Hatch said icily, ‘is because, at the end of the day, we have to make it stand up in court. Now look, Mr Lewis, I was very patient. I accepted your desire to do all you could for Mrs Capaldi and I answered your curious questions on three separate occasions. But public relations has its limits, and telling West Mercia you were a friend of mine has, quite frankly, done my career no good at all.’
‘Is the file on Maria still open?’
There was a pause.
‘You know it is,’ Hatch said bitterly.
‘There you are, then, lovely. Your ideas were no better than mine.’
‘We’ll get h
im, Mr Lewis, I promise you. Meanwhile, if I could give you a word of advice, some senior policemen get rather suspicious of people who hang around murder investigations. It isn’t healthy, if you know what I mean.’
‘No,’ said Cindy, nettled. ‘I do not.’
‘Think about it. I know you’re harmless, relatively speaking, and that your only crime is an attempt to generate some self-publicity to revive a flagging career, but less tolerant officers …’
‘How dare you!’
‘Sorry,’ said Hatch. ‘That was probably uncalled for. But you would do well to remember that, while we welcome all the information we can get from the public, we do tend to prefer it if you leave the interpretation to us, because we’ve been there before.’
But had they? Had they been here before? Would Hatch have been able to say that when, for instance, his Hampshire colleagues had discovered, not so very long ago, that a particularly brutal stabbing was down to a twelve-year-old girl who received sexual gratification from killing? The youngest potential serial murderer in history, dealt with at Winchester Crown Court in March.
The change of millennium was continually pushing back the parameters of human experience.
The British police had simply never encountered a killer who walked the ancient tracks, in the footsteps of his prehistoric ancestors, and committed ritual murders — he would perhaps regard them as sacrifices — which were identifiable as such only by the nature of their locations. No connection at all, except to someone educated in the arcane mysteries of the landcape.
‘There are more crimes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my friend.’
Cindy watched the clouds formation-dancing over the bay.
‘Bananas, you are, Cindy.’
The eyes of Kelvyn Kite bulged from the shadows in his corner beside the sink.
‘Why do you bother, you old fool?’
The bird had a point. Why did he bother?
Hatch’s barb about self-publicity had stung only briefly. The stage was his career, but not his life. And he didn’t need the money. His lifestyle was humble. He followed the work around Britain and returned periodically to this very pretty fairground caravan on a tiny plot, which he owned, in a sheltered spot on the most beautiful part of the Pembrokeshire coast. His earthly life was neatly boxed, the corners of the box pleasantly scuffed and rounded.