Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

The lights changed to green and Andy pulled away. Maiden saw she was smiling.

‘What it was, it was the midsummer sun coming in through the slit, in this really focused beam. They were warm, too, the hands.’

They were coming into Worcester city centre and by its lights Maiden could see the girl in Andy’s rugged face.

‘Found I was breathing very, very slowly, aware of each breath as it came in. And it was like each breath was going further into my body. And while this happened, it was getting progressively lighter and warmer inside the chamber. The sunlight coming between these big stones like … molten gold from a what-you-call-it? Crucible. I can feel it now.’

Maiden smiled at hard-bitten Andy, all poetic. But he was impressed.

‘Afterwards, walking back to the cottage, it was like, you know, walking on the golden clouds. It was Midsummer’s Day. They told me how this wee girl, years back, she had this vision of the Virgin Mary in this very same place, on Midsummer’s Morning. Jesus, it’s enough tae give you religion.’

He noticed how her accent would ebb — the result of thirty years in England — and then roll back in a wave with the powerful memories.

‘They wouldnae take any more money for the cottage, though Mrs W fed me for days. Fresh fruit, homemade veggie soup. And weird stuff from bottles with stoppers. Miracles. Magic. When I left, I was about a stone heavier but … light. Inside, you know? And before I go, she says, You can do this now. If you want to. So when I get back to work, I’m signing on for every healing course advertised on the back wall of Elham Healthfoods. Acupuncture, homoeopathy, cranial osteopathy, Reiki.’

Maiden said cautiously, ‘You’re saying you used this on me?’

Andy shook her head. ‘I wouldnae claim credit. I’m a convert to alternative medicine, but … powerful enough to kick-start the dead? I don’t dare think. The Holy Mother? Bobby, I was raised a Presbyterian. All I’m saying, there’s something remarkable about that place, and I cannae explain it in any scientific terms. Whether it’s some kind of magnetic thing, some property of the place, like Lourdes and such, I wouldnae have any idea about that. All I know is, when you were lying stone dead on that table in A and E, I was holding the image in ma head of the rising sun at High Knoll and willing it to come into ma hands and to come into you.’

… we thought, for a second, that she was going to drop dead , Jonathan had said.

‘Maybe I blacked out for a split second. And the next thing, the whole team’s jumpin’ up and down and whooping and everybody’s hugging me and stuff. I … couldnae … I couldnae go home. I was too high. Couldnae sleep that night.’

They were through the city now, back in the dark country.

‘So why didn’t you feel like that, Bobby? Breaks ma heart.’

The other side of Hereford, small signs were saying Michaelchurch, Craswall, Longtown. Tiny, scattered lights from windows in the sky. Hill country.

‘I feel I’ve been ungrateful,’ Maiden said. ‘You wasted your … light.’

‘Get lost. There’s always a reason for things. Did I ask you what you believed, Bobby? If you ever believed there was stuff out there?’

‘Yeah, well …’ Through the windscreen, Maiden saw a church steeple greyly smoke-ringed with low night cloud. ‘I used to believe all kinds of stuff. Once.’

‘When you were gonny be a painter?’

‘Yeah. Not many coppers believe. Like doctors. Like how can any kind of a just God allow this shit …?’

‘I’m a cynic, Bobby. And a sceptic. I take a lot of convincing. Years of seeing good human beings die prematurely and bad human beings keep on recovering. I have no answers. And yet …’

‘Truth is I’d love to believe all that,’ Maiden said. ‘Be nice to be that kind of person. New Age cop. But my experience of being dead ties in only too well with the kind of deaths I’ve been seeing for years. Cold, ugly … to be avoided.’ He sighed. ‘To be avoided.’

At the end of the village street, a muddied sign said: Capel-y-ffin. Mountain road, unsuitable for heavy vehicles .

‘Nearly there, son,’ Andy said. She was thinking of how, when she talked to Marcus yesterday, he said Mrs Willis told him she had seen a black light. Over the Knoll.

That would make sense to Bobby, all right. With his experience. Black light.

In the headlights, the whitened bone-branches of two half-dead trees locked horns over the road.

Never needed an alarm; he awoke at six, precisely, to the bloody second. Always woke at six, from the days when he was employed to force-feed Shakespeare sonnets to gluesniffing thugs.

So, when Marcus fumbled on his glasses and the luminous clock said 4.55, he knew there was a problem.

Had hardly any sleep. Didn’t get to bed until half past one. Sitting around waiting for the Anderson woman — seriously, who could you rely on these days? — and worrying about Mrs Willis, who’d gone to bed early after two hours sitting alone in her Healing Room and not — here was the clincher — not even coming out for The Archers .

Another crash. Thunderous but familiar. An October gust thrusting at the barn door, slamming it back and forth — what happened to the new padlock and chain? One day that door would blow off and there’d have to be a gaping hole for the duration, because he couldn’t afford to replace it. Whole bloody fabric was coming apart, rot setting in, and the farmhouse would collapse a bloody sight faster than the original castle.

Felt he was under siege in his own ruins, the motte a tiny island in a Falconer sea, foundations eroding. The whole of the western world turning into a Falconer society: glib, superficial, arrogant, narcissistic.

Bastards .

The barn door went again, this time with a faint splintering coda, as though it had been hit by a team of men with a battering ram and they were backing off for another go. It must have sprung completely open.

In the dark, Marcus pulled his trousers from the bedpost ( never be caught without your trousers) and his tweed jacket from the bedroom door, hauling it on over his string vest. Creeping in his socks down the stone stairs — although there was little danger of awakening Mrs Willis, state of her hearing these days — and stepping into his wellies by the back door, Malcolm ambling through to join him.

The cold hit him with a surprisingly vicious punch. Be winter before you knew it. Seemed no bloody time at all since last winter, the way the years just flashed by. But, then, why shouldn’t they? A year was nothing. Sixty years were nothing; what could you learn in sixty bloody years? What had Marcus Bacton learned?

Bugger all of any real significance. ‘Just has to be more than this,’ he told the dog. Grabbing his torch from the hook in the porch, stumbling into the yard.

The barn door blew out at him as he reached it, almost knocking him over. Bastard. Looked like the bloody chain had snapped. But when he pointed his torch at it, he saw the chain hanging loose from the hasp, the padlock still dangling from the chain … and the bloody padlock was open .

What the hell? Couldn’t be a burglar or a tramp looking for a bed, unless it was a tramp with the skill and patience to pick locks, and the door was so rotten anyway that he could have kicked his way in quicker, and … Good God!

Marcus saw that the key was still in the padlock.

The keys to the buildings were all kept in an old coffee tin on the kitchen window ledge.

Oh my God.

Mrs Willis .

Andy swung the car sharply right into a bumpy track, between outstretched arms of stone.