by Phil Rickman
‘And you are?’
‘Magda. I run this place. Now look, I don’t have time for this. We have a course next week, a dozen people, we’re mega-busy, so please get back in your car-’
‘I never heard of you. I believe my editor spoke to someone called Ersula Underhill.’
Magda blinked. ‘That makes no sense. Ersula’s ancient history.’
The words pushed a cold skewer into Grayle, who was just imagining Ersula, in a white lab-coat, messing with tapes and stuff and taking no shit whatsoever from this woman.
‘Anyway,’ Magda said, ‘Ersula Underhill wasn’t authorized to arrange for journalists or anybody else to come here.’
‘You say she’s gone? Like, where?’ Grayle noticed that, in the Portakabin behind her, the giant flute had ceased. She watched Magda’s eyes.
‘Look.’ Magda had her hands aggressively on her hips. ‘What is this?’
‘Could I please speak with Professor Falconer?’
‘No. Go away.’
‘Well, actually …’ a man’s voice said, and Grayle, half expecting this, turned towards the door of the Portakabin.
He was lean and he wore leather cowboy boots, his greying hair pulled back into a ponytail. He had an easy smile. He carried two small cassette tapes. She remembered his face from the front of the videotape package Duncan Murphy had given her in Oxford.
Magda shrugged, expressionless, and walked away towards the house without giving Grayle another glance.
‘And which publication do you write for?’ Roger Falconer said lightly.
Grayle suddenly started feeling nervous as hell.
The atmosphere had settled around Cindy the second he was inside. Dark little hall, smell of damp. An acute tang of despair in the chaos its occupant called a study.
It enclosed Marcus Bacton like a fog. His hair was lank, the purplish bags under his eyes blown up by his glasses. He looked like a man in need of help, but it was never wise to suggest this to anyone. Always better to turn it the other way round.
‘Come for your help, I have, Mr Bacton.’
Marcus Bacton grunted. ‘Better sit down then.’ He tossed two telephone directories from the sofa and about a dozen pieces of paper flew out. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, but he seemed too weary to pick them up.
The dark-haired young man came into the study. He must be over twenty years younger than Bacton. Somehow, he looked even less healthy. His face was pale and blotched, his eyes clouded. This made no sense to Cindy; Phenomenologist editorials had been full of references to the wonderful healing ambience.
‘I have to say, Lewis,’ Marcus Bacton said, ‘I’m totally nonplussed. Are you actually telling me you’ve come all this way to talk about this bloody serial-killer nonsense?’
Cindy saw the younger man stiffen, his eyes still.
‘Er, this is my, er, nephew. Maid-’
‘Wilson,’ the young man said. ‘Bobby Wilson.’
‘How are you, Bobby? Yes, I’m afraid I have come to talk about this serial killer nonsense.’
Bobby leaned against a wall, his arms folded. ‘You see?’ Marcus Bacton said to him. Bobby didn’t look at him.
‘What does he mean?’ Cindy said.
Bobby sighed. ‘He had a letter from one of his readers who suffers from fairies in the greenhouse. That’s not you, is it?’
Cindy was furious but contained it. ‘No, lovely,’ he said. ‘That’s not me.’
He paused. Marcus scowled at Bobby.
‘I’m the one who wants to know who killed his housekeeper,’ Cindy said.
XXVI
Corn-haired, apple-cheeked Adrian pushed the play button and the big noise wafted out of wall-mounted speakers. This close, it didn’t sound so much like a flute as the sound you made when you blew down a seashell or maybe across the open top of a wine bottle.
‘Adrian and various students spent three weeks inside Neolithic underground chambers recording this stuff,’ Roger Falconer said. ‘Different times of day, different weather conditions. Quite impressive, isn’t it?’
‘What does it mean?’ Grayle wondered.
‘Quite significant, actually.’ Falconer wore a frayed denim shirt. Nestling in his greying chest hair was what looked like a flint arrowhead on a leather thong. His smile wanted to eat you up. ‘It supports the theory that what we know as burial chambers served other purposes, perhaps initiatory. Yes?’
‘Mmm.’ Grayle nodded. Coming on like a journalist, as this now seemed acceptable. ‘The Native Americans had something similar, right? The Hopi?’
‘Exactly. Not so apparent now as it probably was when they were built, but the suggestion is that these subterranean cells were constructed as much for auditory as visual effect. To provide a sensory experience for the person inside.’
‘To condition their consciousness,’ Adrian said, his voice brisk with enthusiasm and private schooling. ‘To make them accessible to Higher Influences.’
‘Yes, well,’ said Falconer. ‘For Adrian, I’m afraid, it’s only the beginning.’
‘Oh gosh, yes.’ Adrian stopped the machine and exchanged cassettes. ‘If you listen to this, you’ll hear … hold on, I’ll wind back about ten seconds … now listen very carefully.’
Adrian pushed the button and stood aside from the machine, like a stage magician, looking, at the same time, too rough-hewn and honest for that line of work.
‘OK?’
‘Sure.’ Grayle was feeling more relaxed and quite interested. After the cool, edgy reception from Magda, the whole atmosphere had changed, Roger and Adrian both up-front, friendly, charming.
‘There,’ Adrian said. ‘Did you hear it?’
‘Huh?’ The Portakabin was divided into white-partitioned sections. It looked cool and modern, charts on the walls.
‘OK, I’ll run it again. In fact I’ll turn it up a little, if your ears can stand it. You have to realize, of course, that all this is hugely amplified anyway, although we’ve managed to filter out much of the hiss.’
The hoarse, hollow whistling came rushing out of both the speakers like a gathering storm.
‘Now,’ Adrian said. ‘There it goes. Hear it? Sort of like atcha-ka, atcha-ka. ‘
‘Probably a bird,’ said Falconer.
‘Roger, it was at night. ‘
‘Hedgehog, then.’
Adrian didn’t look deflated. His face glowed with excitement.
‘What do you think it is?’ Grayle asked him.
‘Well, I think … I believe … we’re listening to a chant. Possibly the remains of a chant. Of course, it’s obviously deteriorated over thousands of years.’
Falconer smiled indulgently at Adrian and shook his head.
‘Hold on,’ Grayle said. ‘You’re saying this is … like a prehistoric voice?’
‘Stone records sound,’ Adrian said. ‘It’s infused with magnetism. Stone records voices and images too, and one day I’m going to prove it.’
Roger laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. ‘If only you could, old chap. Be enormously illuminating, because we really have no idea what kind of language these Neolithic people employed. You see, Grayle, that’s what the University of the Earth’s really all about. While I’m not convinced, not by a very long way, that there’s anything to this EVP …’
‘Electronic Voice Phenomena,’ Adrian explained.
‘… we’re giving Adrian a chance to experiment under scientific conditions. And we’re letting interested members of the public share in that experience, which makes for a rather exciting, memorable holiday for them and helps fund our continuing research. Science should never be rarefied or elitist.’
Grayle nodded, wondering if Ersula would agree.
‘We do make a bit of a show of the arguments between us,’ Adrian admitted. ‘It all adds to the fun. I mean, you know, don’t put that in your article. Which paper was it? Sorry. In one ear, out the other.’
‘Story of his life,’ said Roger.
‘The New York Courie
r,’ Grayle said, hoping to God they wouldn’t check. Cautiously, she’d called herself Grayle Turner. Feeling she just might learn more if she didn’t come out as Ersula’s sister until it was absolutely necessary. ‘It’s, uh, it’s a tabloid.’
‘Don’t be ashamed of that.’ Roger laughed. ‘We had an enormously successful season after the People featured us.’
‘Kept asking me how many women had dreams about being seduced by hairy cavemen.’ Adrian produced that peculiar English laugh you could only call a chortle.
‘We have people sleeping at ancient sites under supervision,’ Roger said. ‘And recording their dreams. Adrian’s convinced that the very nature of the dreams are conditioned by magnetic and radioactive forces and who knows what else.’
‘And you’re not?’
‘I’m interested. But convinced only by evidence.’
‘We’re giving you evidence all the time.’ Adrian sounding almost exasperated. ‘We’re bombarding you with evidence.’
‘My place,’ Roger said firmly, ‘is on the fence. Until, perhaps, we have something really big to announce.’
Bobby Maiden was startled and on his guard. What was this?
The woman called Cindy — a woman Marcus had apparently never seen before — was sitting in the study, jingling her bangles and expounding some crazy theory linking together a series of apparently unconnected killings spread over half of southern Britain.
‘Some of them, see,’ this Cindy said, ‘make perfect sense. Or at least they respond to this person’s warped logic. A hunt saboteur? Yes. Because he-or she, though I think not — supports blood sports. A motorcyclist who churns up and pollutes an ancient track? Yes. A warning to the despoilers.’
‘God preserve us.’ Marcus raised his eyes, in disgust, to the yellowed ceiling.
‘But the others … well, it’s as if the victim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The boy in the doorway, the birdwatcher … you’ve seen that one in the papers? The man who was battered to death near Avebury?’
Cindy had brought out a file of notes and maps and press cuttings. Maiden imagined her arriving at some police station with this stuff, the task of getting rid of her being delegated down and down to the most junior DC. The DC wondering if there might possibly be something in this that would make his name and his boss saying, Look, son, you’ll get used to people like this … be pleasant, give her a cup of tea and get her the hell out of here.
‘I haven’t been in person to the birdwatcher site,’ Cindy said. ‘But I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t just like the others.’
‘In what way?’ Maiden was sitting at the other end of the sofa, trying not to show any professional interest. Marcus was polishing his glasses, always a danger sign.
‘On a ley,’ Cindy said. ‘All the murders have been on leys. You do know what I mean, I suppose?’
‘Remind me?’
‘My,’ said Cindy. ‘You can’t have spent much time with your uncle. Leys are straight lines — sometimes visible as ancient tracks, but mostly not — which have been found to connect prehistoric sites and some more modern buildings, like churches, which were built upon them. They appear to mark channels of spiritual energy.’
Marcus rammed on his glasses. ‘And more recently it’s been suggested that the original tracks were reserved by our remote ancestors, expressly for the passage of the spirits. So you’re trying to tell us you actually-’
‘Indeed.’ Cindy picked up two cuttings which had fallen to the floor and also a KitKat wrapper. Like she was just itching to tidy this place up.
‘You actually believe …’ Marcus tipped his chair back against the wall, Cindy’s eyes going at once to the dirty scuffmark. ‘… that someone is killing people … on leys? Deliberately?’
‘Obvious to me, it was, from the moment I arrived at the spot where Maria Capaldi died, in the manner of William Rufus. Now known to have been a ritual death. Did you read up on that, Marcus, as I suggested?’
‘God almighty, woman, I haven’t even had the bloody time to think about it. We’ve had a death, in case you-’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was just pointing out that when the king’s body was put upon a cart and taken to Salisbury, his blood was said — this is in the account by William of Malmesbury — to have dripped to the ground the whole way.’
‘So?’
‘A line of blood, Marcus. Murray, in her book, points out that this was obviously an impossibility but that it is consistent with the belief that the blood of the Divine Victim must fall to the ground to fertilize it.’
‘So how do the others fit into this pattern? Nobody else was shot with a damned crossbow.’
Cindy shrugged. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t appropriate. My feeling is that he works intuitively. For instance, there would, to him, have been a poetic justice, a holistic justice, in the gory death of one of the motorcyclists who destroyed the Monks’ Trod in mid-Wales. Decapitated as his machine is rushing along the sacred road, spraying out a line of blood in the slipstream. The fact that it didn’t work out like that-’
‘Equally,’ Maiden said, ‘it could have been some mindless rural vigilante. Or a farmer fed up with the noise. Or an angry rambler …’
Cindy tossed him a curious glance. ‘You remind me of a friend of mine, a certain Chief Inspector Hatch.’
‘Ha!’ Marcus said.
‘Look,’ Maiden said carefully, ‘The police are not thick. But when manpower and money are tight, they tend to stick to procedure. If there’s anything in this idea, they’ll get around to it.’
‘After a few more deaths.’ An edge to Cindy’s voice now. ‘When he’s killed again and again and become careless. The problem with the police is they always look for the prosaic solution first.’
‘That’s because ninety-nine per cent of crimes are not committed by subtle people.’
‘A serial murderer’s mind is never a simple mechanism, Bobby. They are open to strange influences, see, especially now, approaching the millennium. Psychological profiling is primitive and hopelessly inadequate. Think how many apparently motiveless murders are later accounted for by the perpetrator hearing voices. ‘
‘Most of them only remember the voices after they’ve been nicked. At which stage, a psychiatric hospital often seems strangely preferable to the lifers’ wing.’
‘Never mind all this psychological bollocks,’ Marcus said irritably. ‘What I’m totally failing to bloody see is how you can conceivably link this nonsense with the natural — certified natural — death of the old lady we’re about to bury.’
Maiden shuddered.
‘Yes …’ Cindy leaned back into the sofa cushions and sighed. ‘The truth is I can’t. Not yet. That’s why I’m here. I suppose that any death linked to an ancient site is, for me, at the moment, a suspicious death, and when you told me on the telephone … Well, a few things fell together.’
‘What bloody business is it of yours anyway?’
‘Perhaps I, too, am hearing voices,’ Cindy said sadly, and Marcus finally lost patience and leapt up from his chair.
‘You’re bloody mad! You’ve just come here to try and make something out of the tragically natural death of a bloody good woman! You’re as half-baked as Miss Pinder and her bloody ectoplasm! You’re as unhinged as the old bat from Diss with the fairies in the fucking greenhouse!’ Marcus’s hands clenched. ‘Excuse me.’
‘He’s had a lot to cope with,’ Maiden said, as the study door slammed.
‘So have you, by the look of it, lovely. Still got an eye under there, I hope. What is it you do, Bobby?’
‘Painter. Pictures.’
‘Well, there’s interesting. Make a living at it?’
‘One day, maybe.’
‘Otherwise, you’re between jobs, is it?’
‘On the sick,’ Maiden said. ‘Road accident. What do you do, Cindy? When you’re not investigating serious crime.’
‘Oh, a jobbing thespian, I am. When I can get the work. And an enterta
iner when I can’t. Comedy.’
‘And this is all part of your routine, is it?’
Cindy’s piercing eyes glittered. ‘Don’t believe any of it, do you, lovely? You think I’m an old stirrer.’
‘I just think all you’ve got is a theory. You’ve no evidence at all. You don’t seem to have any possibility of getting evidence. Also, there’s the problem that ley lines haven’t been proved to exist.’
‘Ah, so you do have some knowledge of these things, then.’
‘We’re not all thick and prosaic.’
‘Artists?’ Cindy said blandly. ‘I never thought they were.’
Damn.
‘Well,’ Cindy said, ‘you may argue that the existence of leys has not been proved to the satisfaction of scientists, but I, in turn, would argue that this is irrelevant. All that matters, see, is that he believes. He is killing people on what the maps and his own intuition tell him are lines of earth-energy.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Bobby, I could give you a dozen convincing explanations, each one dependent on the killer’s own conception of earth-lines and the uses of ancient sites. If he believes leys are spirit-paths, perhaps he feels he is releasing the spirits of his victims to stimulate the energy-flow. Perhaps he sees them as sacrifices. Perhaps he feels he is himself absorbing the energy of his victims.’
‘I just can’t hear it in court, somehow.’
Cindy leaned towards him, with a waft of lavender. ‘I tell you, Bobby, compared with the rippers who hear voices and Charles Manson, who believed he was in psychic contact with the Beatles, this person is utterly and coldly rational, according to his beliefs.’
More wheels in the yard brought Maiden to his feet.
A coffin passed across the window. He recoiled. The inside of his mouth felt instantly dry and rough. The hearse reversed and three-point-turned in the yard, under the broken castle walls.
He was aware of Cindy watching his reaction with great interest.
‘You’re trembling. Don’t like funerals, is it?’
‘Who does?’
‘Love them, we do, in Wales. You fascinate me, Bobby. You must’ve seen any number of corpses in your line of work.’