The Cold Calling cc-1

by Phil Rickman

  As for his inner life … Well, sometimes it seemed to be getting richer, more complex. One day, he would have to retire and embark upon the final stage of the great quest, in preparation for his transition. But that was probably years ahead. He couldn’t help feeling there should be an interim stage. The idea that one should live one’s spiritual life solely in preparation for what was to follow did seem unnecessarily self-indulgent. There ought to be a way of using the incidental abilities one inevitably acquired along the way for the greater good of the community at large.

  To fight earthly evils?

  Perhaps.

  Cindy gathered all the press cuttings into a pile. On top was the one from the Shropshire Star he’d picked up last week, during the two nights the Transit Theatre Company’s Macbeth had been playing the Ludlow Assembly Rooms. It was the kind of news story which, for Hatch, would be a complete joke but, to Cindy, was confirmation. MURDER SHOP ‘HAUNTED’ CLAIM.

  The story was written in a way that indicated nobody on the paper believed it either. It referred to the butchering of the homeless boy in the shop doorway, the case which had brought Cindy to the notice of the West Mercia CID. Now a local youth leader was claiming attendance at his club was falling off because youngsters didn’t like to go past this particular shop at night.‘Two of the girls told me they had felt a sudden drop in the temperature as they passed the doorway, and one is convinced she saw a trail of blood dripping from the step to the gutter.‘These are decent girls, not, in my view, the kind to be prone to fantasies,’ said Mr Ruscoe, who is calling for the area to be exorcised.However, the owner of thehardware shop, Chamber of Trade chairman Mr James Mills, has condemned the scare. ‘This was a terrible incident, which most people in this town just want to try to forget,’ he said.‘Fairy stories like this are not good for trade or local morale, and Ted Ruscoe should have more sense than to encourage them.’

  ‘Fairy stories,’ said Cindy scornfully. ‘Fairy stories!’

  The man would, of course, have to be the chairman of the Chamber of Trade. Cindy was continually amazed at the arrogance of small-time local officials, who considered their particular field of commercial endeavour to be of supreme importance in the great scheme of things.

  The police, in most cases, were exactly the same. If you couldn’t explain it to the Crown Prosecution Service they wouldn’t even consider it.

  Cindy swept the pile of press cuttings into a box file and went back to work on the magazines. Wherever he went, he sought out the local dealers in publications devoted to paganism and earth-magic, some of them, like Fortean Times, Kindred Spirit and Chalice, high-quality glossies; some, like The Ley Hunter, quite specialized, and others little more than photocopied pages stapled together. At least one of these, surely, was read — and possibly contributed to — by the killer. Cindy saw this individual as someone with very definite and fixed ideas — ideas which he would want to disseminate. Also, like most killers, he would want his acts to be noticed.

  The letters pages were a very likely source of clues. Cindy flicked open an issue of Pagan Quest.

  Dear Sir, I have been a worshipper of Thor for over nine years and have recently moved to Basingstoke, where I am anxious to contact fellow pagans…

  Most of them, unfortunately, were on this level. Cindy wondered if there were any submitted letters that the editors of these magazines considered too extreme for publication. He’d had no reply from Marcus Bacton at The Phenomenologist. But perhaps that had not been such a great idea. The journal only came out at three- monthly intervals, so even if its staid and ageing readers had any ideas, it might be Christmas before they appeared.

  ‘Kelvyn, who was that boy we met in Gloucester who wanted to interview me? Long, red hair.’

  ‘Jasper somebody, wasn’t it?’

  ‘His mag was called … No, it wasn’t Jasper, you stupid bird, it was Gareth, Gareth Milburn, and the mag was called Cauldron … Crucible!’

  Cindy leafed through a copy of a pagan magazine in which other, smaller pagan magazines tended to place small ads.

  ‘Here we are, Kelvyn … Crucible! Oh, and a phone number, there’s unusual.’

  Cindy prodded out the number on his mobile.

  ‘Blessed be! You’re through to Crucible. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you … one way or another, ha, ha, ha.’

  ‘Gareth, it’s Cindy Mars-Lewis, the humble thespian you were so determined to out as a pagan earlier this year …’

  Cindy hung up, unsatisfied, restless. There must be something else he could do.

  ‘What’s your hurry, old fool?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel …’

  Cindy picked up his pendulum, slipped a middle finger through the loop.

  ‘… I feel it’s getting closer.’

  When held over the maps at each of the murder spots, the pendulum reacted in exactly the same way: a furious anti-clockwise spin. What would Hatch say to that?

  You’re making it do that, he’d say scornfully. Even if you’re not doing it consciously, something inside you wants it to happen.

  Of all the extra-sensory disciplines, dowsing was the most widely accepted. It began with the practical skill of water-divining, but no-one knew where it ended, how deep it would go in its search for hidden truths. Sometimes, it seemed to be simply a way of communicating to your conscious mind something that you already subconsciously knew. Other times, as the great T. C. Lethbridge had first demonstrated, it could be your link with different levels of existence and, perhaps, with some great cosmic database from which information could be gathered.

  Sometimes, as Cindy had found, the pendulum would spin like a propeller, a preliminary to shamanic flight … as when he’d held it over the spot in the Elan Valley in mid-Wales where the barbed-wire trap had been laid.

  On a whim, Cindy spread out the pagan and earthmagic magazines in a circular fan formation and held the pendulum over the table.

  He closed his eyes. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘tell me. Which one of these, if any, will guide me towards the person who killed Maria Capaldi?’

  Emptying his mind, letting conscious thoughts blow away like leaves.

  Knowing, before he opened his eyes, that the pendulum was spinning furiously.

  But over The Phenomenologist?

  Cindy was sceptical. He was fond of the archaic publication, although under the editorship of this man Bacton it had become a little political, even angry sometimes. Still, there was always some message to be gleaned from the action of the pendulum. Perhaps it was time to telephone Bacton.

  But what about the big question? He collected up all the magazines, put them in a pile on the floor and opened up his map of Britain on the tabletop. He sat upright, a hand on each knee, the pendulum under his right hand. He rotated his head a few times to relax the neck muscles, did some brief tensing and relaxation on the arms and legs, stomach and back, and followed this with some chakra-breathing, three times round the seven points, until he felt light and separated and glowing.

  Then he began to visualize the islands from afar. The sound of the sea and the gulls through the open window lifting him. Feeling the air currents under his wings.

  Flying.

  Over the New Forest to the glade where a girl lay impaled …

  … across the scrubbed mid-Wales hills to the flooded valleys, following the line of the oakwood, faster and faster, into the sudden whiplash snap and twang of barbed wire …

  … spinning back across the English border, the tension of Offa’s Dyke … the flash of rivers, the bulging of hills, the bright, hot grille of the ley lines …

  … towards Clee Hill and the timber-framed market town … above a cobbled street to a doorway, bloodied cardboard in the pink dawn … and up again and down the border until he felt …

  … three twitches from Harold’s Stones and the choking terror of a girl, thumbs in her larynx …

  … Across the Marlborough Downs, over old crop circles, feeling the magnetic, goose-pimpling
pull of the still-pulsing Avebury henge, hovering over a field he did not know where a faceless man lay under a mask of blood …

  … and then … and then …

  Cindy felt his hand rising from his knee and the weight of the pendulum as it began to swing over the map. He closed his eyes.

  Now.

  Where will it happen next?

  Later, unnerved, Cindy telephoned Marcus Bacton, editor of The Phenomenologist.

  ‘Marsh-what?’

  ‘Mars-Lewis. We’ve never spoken before, but I pen the occasional piece for you under the name Cindy the Shaman.’

  ‘Oh my God. Look here, Mrs, er, Lewis, we’re a trifle old-fashioned at The Phenomenologist. Correspondents who wish to communicate with us tend to put it in writing.’

  ‘Just wondering, I was, Mr Bacton, if you had perused my letter regarding the murders.’

  ‘Oh, hell, Look, er, Lewis. One doesn’t want to bring down the heavy editorial hand, but — much as we value your contributions on Celtic shaman practices — this is not bloody True Crime Monthly.’

  ‘No, indeed, I understand. But I have personal reasons for continuing my investigations and it has occurred to me that you may be able to help me.’

  ‘Very much doubt that. Look, I’m rather up to the bloody eyes-’

  ‘I suspect the person I’m looking for, see — the murderer — may well, at some point, have been in communication with your periodical.’

  ‘Oh, right. You’re saying one of our chaps is a bloody psycho. I see. Well, what about Miss Pinder, the ectoplasm lady from Chiswick? I can just imagine her striding across the Welsh moors with a fifty-foot roll of barbed wire …’

  ‘Always this receptive, are you, Mr Bacton?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No wonder your circulation is sinking so rapidly.’

  ‘Bloody hell! Look, Lewis. I can do without this. Things are bloody fraught enough just at the moment. For a start, we’ve had a rather difficult death …’

  The phone seemed to freeze in Cindy’s hand.

  ‘Death?’

  It took nearly twenty minutes and several attempts by Bacton to get him off the line, but when Cindy finally put down the phone he had learned how and where the housekeeper, Mrs Willis, had died. And that she had been a very good woman, a herbalist and a spiritual healer.

  Cindy retired to bed with several back numbers of The Phenomenologist and Franklin and Job’s Guide to Prehistoric Remains on the Welsh Borders.

  He already had his suitcase packed.

  XX

  Marcus Bacton raged quite a bit.

  His way of dealing with grief, Bobby Maiden decided. Obviously a huge hole in Marcus’s life now, and the farmhouse seemed as much of a shell as the castle outside. Yet he never spoke of Mrs Willis as anyone more than the woman who had kept his home together. And his only show of emotion was rage.

  Maiden had kept well out of the way while the paramedics were around, leaving Andy as the sole official witness to the old woman’s death.

  If they hadn’t taken her off the stone, it would have looked suspicious; as it was — an experienced nurse with her when she died — it was just another case of an elderly woman wandering away, the way some elderly women did, and collapsing from a stroke.

  The day after Mrs Willis’s death, Andy had gone back to Elham, telling Marcus she’d return for the funeral. Examining Maiden’s eye one more time, ordering him to get a good night’s sleep.

  And he had. No dreams, no sweat.

  And again. Two good nights. He wanted to believe he was coming out of it; he didn’t dare. Death still hung over him but its shadow was less defined.

  Andy had bathed and repatched his eye with more gauze and tape. The second day, a small parcel arrived containing a black plastic eyeshield.

  Maiden put on the patch, laid low, blanked out. The holiday cottage was a good place for it, a former dairy with only three rooms and all the walls of whitewashed stone. There was a small kitchen with a hotplate and grill, and Andy had left bread and soup and fruit. He didn’t see too much of Marcus, who was making funeral arrangements, raging at the vicar, who claimed his churchyard was full and Mrs Willis wasn’t local anyway. ‘Fat bastard,’ Marcus fumed. ‘Know where he’s from? Fucking Croydon.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell him who she was?’

  ‘Because I don’t know who she was. And that’s official.’

  Marcus shoved at him a letter from Mrs Willis’s solicitors, in Hereford. She’d left him five thousand pounds and requested that he should make no inquiries into her past, nor in any way speculate publicly about her.

  ‘Bloody typical. Unassuming to an almost perverse degree. Didn’t even like being called a healer. Less than a year ago, she cured Amy, at the pub, of bloody skin cancer. Amy knew what it was, the bloody doctors knew what it was … Mrs Willis said it was just a rash. And you’ve heard about Anderson, of course. If you can’t take the word of a trained nurse …’

  And me? Maiden wondered. Did she bring me back, by proxy?

  Relaxed enough, now, to consider the possibility. Almost dispassionately. He felt sorry about Mrs Willis, of course he did, just like the last hundred deaths, the accidents, the suicides, the murders. But in the end, it wasn’t his tragedy.

  Or was it? Why had he urged Andy to get the old girl off the stone? He didn’t know, then or now. Why had he felt so uncomfortable at the place you had to be careful, in front of Marcus, not to call Black Knoll?

  ‘So no-one’s going to know she was Annie Davies?’

  Marcus held up the letter in frustration. ‘Bastards,’ he said.

  Maiden wasn’t quite sure who he meant. Perhaps he meant everybody.

  Even though they’d agreed that he was Bobby Wilson, Marcus’s nephew, over for the funeral of a woman he’d come to regard as a granny figure, Maiden never went down to the village. Instead, he took long, uneven walks among the hills around St Mary’s, across this strange no man’s land between England and Wales — pink soil and stone, autumn fires on the fields under the dark mantelpiece of the mountains.

  Lying down in the grass, a west wind on his face, he thought about the kind of things he wanted to respond to. He thought about painting again. And he thought about Emma Curtis.

  The second night, Marcus banged on the cottage door to say Andy was on the phone for him. Police had been waiting for her at home. Wondering if she had any idea of the whereabouts of their missing colleague, about whom they were a little worried.

  Also wondering where she’d been, perhaps.

  Maiden took the call in Marcus’s study. ‘How did you handle it?’

  ‘Told them — Jesus God — told ‘em I’d spent the night wi’ a man friend. Refusing to disclose his name on account of he was a doctor and married.’

  ‘Nice one,’ Maiden said.

  ‘Aw, sure. Like they were gonny believe there was any doctor still young enough to work who’d take up wi’ an old bat like me.’

  ‘Or that you’d take up with a doctor, knowing how tired they always are.’

  ‘Cheeky sod. You’re sounding better, Bobby.’

  ‘Two nights now.’

  ‘Did I no tell you about the air? Anyway, I told this guy I had absolutely no idea where you might be and if they found you to bring you back at once, on account we hadn’t yet given your head the all-clear.’

  Maiden gazed into the flames jetting between flaking logs in Marcus’s woodstove. ‘Who was this?’

  ‘CID guy. Sergeant. Said he was a friend of yours.’

  ‘Mike Beattie?’

  ‘Aye. Trust him at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I did say you’d been very mixed up and restless and it was no big surprise to learn you’d skipped out. That all right for you?’

  ‘That’s fine. Just one thing. Maybe you could avoid ringing here from home. Call boxes are best.’

  ‘Aw, hey, come on … they wouldnae-’

  ‘They might,’ Maiden said. ‘They just
might. I mean, if they already are doing, we’re stuffed. But these things can take time to fiddle.’

  Amid the clutter on Marcus’s desk of beaten-up mahogany lay a new hardback book with a dark cover and big, silver lettering: Beyond Roswell: The Paranoid Decades.

  ‘And maybe … I don’t like to ask this, but is there any way you could avoid coming down for the funeral?’

  ‘They could follow me?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘Well,’ Andy said bitterly, ‘if you explain to Marcus. Don’t imagine I’d be missed. I’m no bloody good to her now, am I?’

  When he put down the phone, Marcus was furiously polishing his glasses. He put them on and glared through them.

  ‘Maiden, what kind of shit have you got that woman into?’

  Putting himself between Maiden and the stove. He had on what seemed to be his usual leisurewear, which included a long blue cardigan and a mustard bow tie. It had grown dark outside and the fire accounted for most of the light in the room.

  ‘If you’re going to use my house as some sort of bunker, you can at least tell me precisely why. Am I going to wake up to find the place surrounded by some fucking task force with loud hailers and automatic rifles?’

  ‘I think we can rule out the armed response unit,’ Maiden said. ‘But that’s probably all we can rule out.’

  ‘Going to sit down, are we, Maiden?’ Marcus smiled threateningly. ‘Have a drink?’

  ‘No thanks. No good for head injuries, apparently.’

  He found a sofa. Marcus dragged a bottle of Teachers’ whisky and a tumbler from his desk and slumped with them into an easy chair by the stove, white stuffing spurting out of the seat as though the chair was frothing at the mouth.

  ‘Entertain me,’ he said. ‘Remembering that I spent thirty years interrogating schoolboys. World’s most convincing liar, the schoolboy.’