Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Above him, all around him, dawn birds sing. Birds rattling in the branches, their twittering lives come and gone in a heartbeat .

The Green Man feels the silence of the Old One. Who watched them build the church. Who stood here while the bones of the Barber-Surgeon were crushed beneath an Avebury megalith. Who thrived before Rufus died on Walter Tirel’s bolt in the New Forest .

And still lives .

Awaiting, perhaps, his third millennium .

Because of its size, the oak is more honoured, but the yew has more mystery. It is often referred to as the Death Tree because of its ubiquity in and around graveyards. Few realize that the yews were here long before the graves … that the churches were only built on these sites because they were already sacred, with the yew tree a symbol of that sanctity. Our oldest symbol of immortality .

The sign in this churchyard says, ALTHOUGH YEW TREES ARE DIFFICULT TO DATE, THIS VENERABLE SPECIMEN IS BELIEVED TO BE WELL OVER A THOUSAND YEARS OLD. THE WOODEN BENCH INSIDE THE HOLLOW TRUNK WILL SEAT UP TO TEN ADULTS SIDE BY SIDE .

Or one man sleeping .

It has been an experiment. How will a night in an ancient sacred tree differ from one atop a burial chamber or inside a circle of ritual stones?

The living yew might be expected to record stories, impressions and dreams in a different way from stone, and so it transpires. When he rises from the bench, the Green Man’s dream is still alive and vibrating in colours in his head. He sees clearly what he must do, as if in a film. As if it has already taken place .

Not in or around the yew, but inside the church .

While many centuries younger than the yew, the church is medieval. It stands a hundred yards outside this Worcestershire village, screened from the nearest houses — on an ugly council estate — by a dense copse. He tried the two doors last night and found both locked .

Someone, at some time, will have to let him in .

No-one has passed through in the night. No-one disturbed the Green Man where he lay, his back arched into the yew. He steps outside the tree now, stretches. Goes to release his morning water among the bushes .

And scarcely has he sheathed his tool than he hears the click of the wicket gate in the churchyard wall .

It is not yet seven a.m .

Never has a sacrifice been delivered so promptly .

The Green Man slides to his knees in the bushes. The visitor walks along the gravelled path and into his place in the Green Man’s living dream .

He is elderly, perhaps in his seventies, and slight of build with a bald, bony head and spectacles. He does not appear to be a clergyman, perhaps a verger or sexton. A ring of keys rattles loosely from his right hand .

Big keys. Church keys .

His keys to the afterlife .

The old man whistles as he enters the porch. The Green Man hears him fitting a key into the lock, jiggling it about .

He rises from the bushes .

He strides towards the porch, unarmed. No knife, no crossbow, no gun, no sharp-edged rock .

Just inside the porch is a stone baptismal font, the church’s oldest artefact .

At the end of his living dream, the bowl of the font is glistening with blood and bone and brains .

The verger whistles a tune from some old musical as the church door swings open .

Cindy Mars-Lewis made it three, possibly four, dead, plus one near-miss.

The near-miss was the boy motorcyclist in mid-Wales. The possible was a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl found strangled, but not sexually assaulted, last January, in a bus shelter not far from Harold’s Stones at Trellech in Monmouthshire. This was still only a possible because the bus shelter, as Cindy had confirmed on a site visit, was on a very dubious alignment.

But, then — Cindy watched a boat far out in St Bride’s Bay — there was no evidence this murderer was a perfectionist.

Take the killing of the Midlands businessman on a bird-watching weekend in Wiltshire. The man had been savagely and inexplicably battered to death at the foot of a small hill , in the middle of field a couple of miles from Avebury .

He could almost sense them now, but it would be necessary to visit the actual murder site to be certain, and he was rather unwilling to do this so soon after the event, with police all over the place. Cindy had discovered he was not terribly popular with the police.

In particular, that mild-mannered family man, DCI Hatch, in Bournemouth. Cindy had telephoned Mrs Carlotta Capaldi from Liverpool where he was playing Third Witch in a rather downmarket touring production of the Scottish play, to discover that Hatch would appreciate a word with him.

‘I’ve had an inquiry about you, Mr Lewis. From the West Mercia Regional Crime Squad.’

Suspecting something of the kind, Cindy had waited until he was home before telephoning Bournemouth CID on his mobile.

‘What the holy hell are you playing at?’ Hatch demanded. ‘You just won’t take piss off for an answer, will you? You know there’s absolutely nothing to connect these killings — nothing admissible, anyway — and as for ringing bloody Crimewatch …’

A mistake, Cindy would agree. But the TV programme had run such a detailed reconstruction of the killing of the poor homeless boy in a shop doorway, showing precisely the location of the shop, close to the ancient market cross, and …

‘An impulse, I’m afraid, Chief Inspector. They did appeal for anyone with information.’

‘You didn’t have information. You wasted police time with a crackpot, semi-mystical theory which even I can’t entirely grasp, about so-called ley lines — which I understand the experts say do not even exist — linking a bunch of crimes which simply have nothing in common .’

‘With all respect, Peter,’ said Cindy, ‘that’s what they said about the Yorkshire Ripper.’

‘Not my area,’ Hatch snapped.

‘Oh, no, you don’t want to talk about that, do you? Why Sutcliffe kept walking in and out of the police net because he didn’t fit the profile? And because they were conned by a hoax tape into looking for the wrong type of man entirely.’

‘I don’t see where this-’

‘Still several unsolved murders out there, that might be down to him. And why were they rejected by the Ripper squad? Because they weren’t prostitutes, and the profile said the Yorkshire Ripper Only Kills Prostitutes.’

‘Mr Lewis, we are not looking for a serial killer.’

‘Psychos make their own patterns, see. Sometimes, the police are just so simplistic .’

‘That,’ Hatch said icily, ‘is because, at the end of the day, we have to make it stand up in court. Now look, Mr Lewis, I was very patient. I accepted your desire to do all you could for Mrs Capaldi and I answered your curious questions on three separate occasions. But public relations has its limits, and telling West Mercia you were a friend of mine has, quite frankly, done my career no good at all.’

‘Is the file on Maria still open?’

There was a pause.

‘You know it is,’ Hatch said bitterly.

‘There you are, then, lovely. Your ideas were no better than mine.’

‘We’ll get him, Mr Lewis, I promise you. Meanwhile, if I could give you a word of advice, some senior policemen get rather suspicious of people who hang around murder investigations. It isn’t healthy, if you know what I mean.’

‘No,’ said Cindy, nettled. ‘I do not.’

‘Think about it. I know you’re harmless, relatively speaking, and that your only crime is an attempt to generate some self-publicity to revive a flagging career, but less tolerant officers …’