Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘Don’t put your pension on the line,’ Jonathan warned, ‘for a bit of mumbo jumbo.’

She made the eyepatch.

She told Bobby Maiden to get some sleep. He said, no way. He lay there staring at the ceiling. He seemed to be glad of the pain.

She thought she understood.

Emma Curtis took her into another room. ‘Where are you taking him?’

‘I’m no sure you need to know that, hen.’

‘Nobody’s going to bloody torture me, Sister. And if he can’t visit me , I want to visit him .’

‘You sure you’re good for each other, hen?’

The dark eyes didn’t move. ‘What’s that got to do with the price of eggs?’

‘OK.’ Andy smiled. ‘Let me have your phone number again. I’ll call you when he can see what he’s doing.’

‘Thanks,’ Emma said. ‘And … thanks.’

At two a.m., an ambulance arrived. ‘Apologies, sister,’ the paramedic said, ‘earliest I could make it.’ Giving Andy the envelope containing Bobby Maiden’s wallet and his keys. ‘Dr Jonathan says good luck. With the, er, mumbo jumbo.’

Three-fifteen a.m., Andy driving as if she could read Bobby Maiden’s mind. Grim-faced under the fluffed-up red hair, clogging the pedal as though they were breaking bail — all mobiles alert for a ten-year-old powder-blue Golf with a Greenpeace sticker.

Slowing only whenever she spotted a police car. But it wasn’t police, as such, that Maiden was worried about. He was seeing a dark vehicle blocking a country road. Two men in balaclavas. Tooled up. Silencers. No small talk, no prelims. Maiden, then Andy. The Golf driven into a wood with the bodies.

But, then, Maiden was as paranoid as you can get.

They were a good ten miles out of Elham before Andy spoke.

‘Who’s Emma, then?’

‘Mmm. Well …’ He told her about the hit-and-run car which had first brought him to her attention.

‘Aw, you’re no serious …’

‘Plus — in case you missed the references back there — her old man’s Tony Parker.’

Andy shook her head, laughing her comfortable, smoker’s laugh. ‘Jesus God, Bobby. And I thought I was mixing with lowlife the day they called me into a meeting of the hospital trust.’

‘She’s OK. Didn’t you think?’

Andy thought about it. ‘Aye. Genes aren’t everything. And the last person she’ll ever harm is you. But you’ll know that. Are you no awfully knackered, Bobby?’

‘Long past knackered. Knackered was yesterday.’

She’d tilted the passenger seat for him, but he’d pulled it back up, even further, so it was almost a right angle. He concentrated hard on the lights through the windscreen, but with half his vision blocked by the makeshift patch it was hard to keep his good eye open.

‘But you’re no gonny let yourself sleep, right?’

‘No.’

‘Bobby, you need-’

‘Sleep, sleep and sleep.’

‘You’re no gonny die , Bobby. Not again. I mean like not yet. Not imminently .’

They were at a brightly lit motorway intersection, big blue signs. When they hit the motorway itself, it felt safer: a no man’s land.

‘I was wondering. Got anything in your bag to kind of ward off sleep?’

‘Speed? In your condition? Christ, you would be bloody dead. There’s chocolate biscuits in the glove compartment, and that’s your lot.’

‘Should have asked Clutton.’

‘I don’t like the way you’re talking.’ Andy leaned back in her seat, hands loosening around the wheel. ‘Look, I’m no shrink … But maybe what we’re looking at here is your subconscious manufacturing a smokescreen, setting up a block to shield you from some trauma. Images of bleakness, this cold, soulless place. Cold neutralizes pain. Like when we put the frozen peas on your eye.’

‘Yes … but … Well, OK … Suppose you wake up dead?’

‘Is that no a wee bit contradictory?’

‘With all your bodily juices drying up. Your muscles dead weight. Veins clogged.’

‘Oh.’

‘And being aware of decaying. Tasting the soil.’

‘Shit,’ Andy said.

‘Twice that’s happened. How normal is that?’

‘Aw, hell …’ She hesitated. ‘You know what this says to me? I mean, this is just off the top of my head, I havenae thought it out, but it’s as if when … after we brought you round … some part of you stayed dead. It’s as though something down there in your mind doesnae know we got your body to come back.’

He saw her hands tighten on the wheel.

‘It’s like you’re carrying around your own corpse, Bobby.’

‘Well, thanks,’ Maiden said. ‘That’s very encouraging.’

They kept on talking after that. There was a flask of black coffee Em had made, and chocolate biscuits. They were through Spaghetti Junction, so little traffic this time in the morning that the great concrete snakepit looked like a major overspend.

She was telling him about this guy called Marcus Bacton, a schoolteacher for over thirty years, though he claimed to hate kids worse than the flu. Took early retirement after his wife’s death, and bought himself this rundown farmhouse on the Welsh border, to start a new career as a magazine editor.

‘Kind of Learned Gentleman’s Journal of the Unexplained. Printed on the kind of paper you wouldnae wipe your arse on in case your fingers went through. So … he’s stuck out in the sticks, losing money hand over fist on this awful rag, and having to pay a housekeeper on account of he cannae tie his own shoes. Lucky to land one who didnae ask for much other than a roof over her. Mrs Willis. The healer.’

Andy pulled off the motorway, giving two fingers to the driver of an Escort who’d zipped in from the fast lane and cut in front.

‘Dickhead. Listen, I never went for this baloney. Laying on of hands. Sending healing vibes. I’m a professional. Like, if it works, what we doin’ spending billions on hospitals and clinics? And yet …’

Healing vibes. He was remembering Jonathan telling him about Andy’s hands either side of his head as he lay dead, Andy’s eyes closed. It was as if she was somewhere else. She was concentrating so hard on bringing you back, it was as though nothing else in the world mattered or ever would again if she failed. When you started to breathe, she just sagged. And we thought …

Maiden jerked in his seat. He’d almost slipped away. It was like waking up on the edge of a sheer cliff. He swallowed a lot of air and laid his cheek against the window, for the coolness of it.

‘… burial chamber,’ Andy was saying. ‘Part of it had collapsed, and there was a sign telling you not to go inside. But me — all six and a half stone of me — I fitted under the capstone, no trouble. I was that weak, you know? When you said that about being dried out like a corpse, that was how it was for me, with the colitis. You’re just crapping all the moisture out of your system. You’re a husk. Tired the whole time, and weary as hell, and you’ll try anything. And so I’m lying there, in this burial chamber, until the dawn comes. You like the dawn, Bobby?’

‘When the world’s all quiet and fresh and sparkly.’

‘This was a dawn like I never knew — and I’ve seen a few thousand, end of a shift. It’s like … very dark in this wee chamber. I must’ve fallen asleep straight away. Just lying there on the hard earth. These huge stones all around me. A really dense sleep. And then, the next thing, I become aware of my hand … I must’ve been lying with my arms under my head and my hands are out in front, and this hand … it’s like it’s on fire.’

The car slowed, her hands on the wheel lit by red light from traffic signals.

‘But it’s … it’s like the fire’s inside . The hand glowing in the darkness. Just this hand. Not the stone, not the earth. Just the hand, like there’s fire inside. So I reach out with the other hand to touch it, and that lights up too.’