Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘It was all so absolutely right ,’ he insisted. ‘I couldn’t get over how right it was.’

They shoved him in. The doors were slammed.

‘What did that mean, Bobby?’ Ron said.

A hand over one eye, blood oozing between the fingers, Bobby demonstrated to Ron how the Rollright Stones could be perfectly viewed in the gap, no more than a foot wide, between two of the Whispering Knights. Now, with all the lights in the circle, it looked almost too easy a target, far closer than four hundred yards.

‘One megalithic site to another,’ Bobby said. ‘Bang.’ He sighed. ‘How many? He got two shots off.’

‘Killed the vicar outright,’ Ron said. ‘One through the back. Another bloke caught one in the thigh, so he’ll be OK. Ambulance on its way. Better take you, too. After we charge you.’

‘That a joke?’

‘Let’s bloody hope so. Stupid bastards. Whoever decided to put your name out, they should be for the jump.’

‘Riggs.’

‘Still need a good explanation. Bloody hell.’

‘He’ll have one. He always has one. So who called you out?’

‘Message from West Mercia. Woman reported a body buried in concrete down near the Welsh border, Hay-on-Wye area. Funny name …’

‘Magda Ring.’

‘Yeah. After they see that body, they start taking her a bit seriously. Mind you …’ Ron smiled ruefully. ‘… if she hadn’t given West Mercia the name Fraser-Hale and a photograph, we’d probably have let him go and pulled you for the lot, Bobby. Yes, David …’

A uniformed sergeant came over. ‘Sir, there’s a bloke …’ He coughed. ‘… a bloke in a bird-suit.’

‘Of course there is,’ Ron said. ‘This is the Rollright bloody Stones. Tell him to piss off.’

Grayle saw Bobby Maiden grin. It looked like it hurt.

Two cops took her back to the circle. Nobody was allowed out of it, despite the downpour. Just about everybody got searched. Charlie’s body had been covered up. There were some cases of latent hysteria. Janny Oates, still unmarried, was not among them. Two policewomen were with her under an umbrella. She was entirely silent, deep in shock. Drenched with blood and all of it Charlie’s.

Jesus. Grayle could only feel numb.

Andy took Marcus back inside, made him lie on the study sofa, Malcolm across his feet. Checked him over for broken bones, but Marcus carried plenty of padding. Cheekbone was a possibility. It was hard for him to talk, which was a mercy for all of them. He should be in hospital; some chance.

Round the back of the house, Vic showed her the body of a man called Gallow. Some of his head had been blown away.

‘You’re looking at contract boys,’ Vic said. ‘The hiring’s always done through a third party, sorter thing, maybe even a fourth party. Riggs wouldn’t touch ‘em with coaltongs. These boys would never even’ve heard the name Riggs.’

Vic and Andy both wore gloves for this. Vic did most of the carrying; he’d found some sacking in the barn and tied it round his waist with orange baler twine.

Andy said, ‘So when Riggs found out where Bobby was, thanks to my foolishness, he took no steps at all to bring him in. He just made a phone call.’

‘Prove it,’ Vic said.

‘Word has it,’ Andy said, ‘that if you yourself turned Queen’s Evidence, or whatever they call it, enough stones might get turned over to open up a path direct to Riggs’s door.’

‘I helped fit up several small operators, sure. Including Dean, my lad, God rest him. But that was for Parker. I won’t drop Parker in it.’

‘Of course,’ Andy said, ‘you wouldnae’ve heard, would you?’

They put both bodies in the back of the white van. They put the guns in too — the sawn-off and the pistol Vic had found near Bez’s body and used on Gallow when he was about to kill Marcus.

Vic found the keys to the van in Bez’s pocket. He said he’d probably drive down the Wye Valley and dump the van somewhere near the Severn Bridge. There was a mess of link roads around a half-built industrial estate. He’d walk to the motorway services, get himself a lift with a lorry driver to anywhere. Stay out of sight for a week or two. Maybe grab a holiday, Minehead or somewhere.

‘And you’ll think about what I said?’ Andy said.

‘I’ll think about it.’

Andy walked back to the farmhouse and wondered, not for the seventeenth time, what it would really be like living here.

Cold. The stones prickly with frost. She had to touch, just once, before she walked away, dug her hands into coat pockets.

Hallowe’en, night of the dead, didn’t seem like a good time for this. But, then, it wasn’t Hallowe’en any more. What did they call the day after Hallowe’en? Was that All Saints Day or All Souls Day? Anyway, the Celtic New Year, Cindy said, so that was OK. And a new moon, too. Must count for something.

And I’m still here, Grayle thought. What am I doing still here, waiting for the start of some stupid ceremony to rehabilitate a pile of rocks?

The pre-dawn wind was kicking at the grass, rattling the gorse bushes. There were no bad vibes around the place, but no good vibes either.

Just some old stones and a bunch of dysfunctional fruitcakes.

After two days of questions and statements and assuring them that she’d return in good time for the trial, Grayle had left Oxford in a fresh hire car. They’d found the little red Rover up against a field gate, couple of hundred yards from the path to the Whispering Knights. Backed up, ready to go. Another sign that Adrian had seen no reason why he wasn’t going to walk away from this.

At Duncan Murphy’s place, Grayle had spent a half-hour on the phone to her father. She told him Ersula was dead, murdered by a clean-shaven, nicely groomed, old-fashioned, well-spoken, all-round decent guy who loved his country. Then she burst into tears. Her father had not asked when she planned to return. Her father only ever had one daughter.

Precisely what Adrian Fraser-Hale had done to Ersula, Grayle did not, at that time, know.

Soon, the whole world would know.

Somehow, without quite figuring out why, Grayle had found herself driving west again. Tuesday night, she was back in her depressing old room at the Ram’s Head in the village of St Mary’s. Along the passage from an even crummier room occupied by one Sydney Mars-Lewis.

‘I should go home,’ she said to him in the bar that night. ‘But I feel so restless. So dislocated. So … so goddamned angry.’

‘A hundred years ago …’ Cindy was wearing his insouciant smile. ‘… he would have been hanged and his body brought back and laid out on the capstone at Black Knoll so that everyone damaged by him could walk up and watch him rot. Would that have helped?’

‘Get outa here,’ Grayle had said.

Now she looked at the High Knoll burial chamber and thought maybe this was what they were about to do. Kind of.

Someone put an arm around her waist. She looked up into an eyepatch.

Bobby Maiden hadn’t been back to Elham. He’d been in Hereford for two weeks, engaged the whole time on the Fraser-Hale case. Sitting in on the days of interviews with Adrian, who was co-operative and expansive and sometimes — although never quite, for Maiden — almost charming.

Different people kept listening to the tapes. ‘Load of balls,’ Armstrong would say periodically. ‘Whichever way you look at it, the feller’s bloody mental.’

Armstrong being the detective superintendent in charge now. Because Adrian was so polite and co-operative, Armstrong didn’t hate Adrian.

He hated Cindy instead.

‘I don’t understand where that mad Welsh poof comes into it,’ he’d say every time Maiden strongly suggested they consult Cindy about some arcane issue relating to earth-magic. Armstrong hated having Cindy in the same room. Seymour, the forensic psychologist inflicted on the team, hated having Cindy in the same county.