Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘How dare you!’

‘Sorry,’ said Hatch. ‘That was probably uncalled for. But you would do well to remember that, while we welcome all the information we can get from the public, we do tend to prefer it if you leave the interpretation to us, because we’ve been there before.’

But had they? Had they been here before? Would Hatch have been able to say that when, for instance, his Hampshire colleagues had discovered, not so very long ago, that a particularly brutal stabbing was down to a twelve-year-old girl who received sexual gratification from killing? The youngest potential serial murderer in history, dealt with at Winchester Crown Court in March.

The change of millennium was continually pushing back the parameters of human experience.

The British police had simply never encountered a killer who walked the ancient tracks, in the footsteps of his prehistoric ancestors, and committed ritual murders — he would perhaps regard them as sacrifices — which were identifiable as such only by the nature of their locations. No connection at all, except to someone educated in the arcane mysteries of the landcape.

‘There are more crimes in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, my friend.’

Cindy watched the clouds formation-dancing over the bay.

‘Bananas, you are, Cindy.’

The eyes of Kelvyn Kite bulged from the shadows in his corner beside the sink.

‘Why do you bother, you old fool?’

The bird had a point. Why did he bother?

Hatch’s barb about self-publicity had stung only briefly. The stage was his career, but not his life. And he didn’t need the money. His lifestyle was humble. He followed the work around Britain and returned periodically to this very pretty fairground caravan on a tiny plot, which he owned, in a sheltered spot on the most beautiful part of the Pembrokeshire coast. His earthly life was neatly boxed, the corners of the box pleasantly scuffed and rounded.

As for his inner life … Well, sometimes it seemed to be getting richer, more complex. One day, he would have to retire and embark upon the final stage of the great quest, in preparation for his transition. But that was probably years ahead. He couldn’t help feeling there should be an interim stage. The idea that one should live one’s spiritual life solely in preparation for what was to follow did seem unnecessarily self-indulgent. There ought to be a way of using the incidental abilities one inevitably acquired along the way for the greater good of the community at large.

To fight earthly evils?

Perhaps.

Cindy gathered all the press cuttings into a pile. On top was the one from the Shropshire Star he’d picked up last week, during the two nights the Transit Theatre Company’s Macbeth had been playing the Ludlow Assembly Rooms. It was the kind of news story which, for Hatch, would be a complete joke but, to Cindy, was confirmation. MURDER SHOP ‘HAUNTED’ CLAIM.

The story was written in a way that indicated nobody on the paper believed it either. It referred to the butchering of the homeless boy in the shop doorway, the case which had brought Cindy to the notice of the West Mercia CID. Now a local youth leader was claiming attendance at his club was falling off because youngsters didn’t like to go past this particular shop at night.‘Two of the girls told me they had felt a sudden drop in the temperature as they passed the doorway, and one is convinced she saw a trail of blood dripping from the step to the gutter.‘These are decent girls, not, in my view, the kind to be prone to fantasies,’ said Mr Ruscoe, who is calling for the area to be exorcised.However, the owner of thehardware shop, Chamber of Trade chairman Mr James Mills, has condemned the scare. ‘This was a terrible incident, which most people in this town just want to try to forget,’ he said.‘Fairy stories like this are not good for trade or local morale, and Ted Ruscoe should have more sense than to encourage them.’

‘Fairy stories,’ said Cindy scornfully. ‘Fairy stories!’

The man would, of course, have to be the chairman of the Chamber of Trade. Cindy was continually amazed at the arrogance of small-time local officials, who considered their particular field of commercial endeavour to be of supreme importance in the great scheme of things.

The police, in most cases, were exactly the same. If you couldn’t explain it to the Crown Prosecution Service they wouldn’t even consider it.

Cindy swept the pile of press cuttings into a box file and went back to work on the magazines. Wherever he went, he sought out the local dealers in publications devoted to paganism and earth-magic, some of them, like Fortean Times, Kindred Spirit and Chalice , high-quality glossies; some, like The Ley Hunter , quite specialized, and others little more than photocopied pages stapled together. At least one of these, surely, was read — and possibly contributed to — by the killer. Cindy saw this individual as someone with very definite and fixed ideas — ideas which he would want to disseminate. Also, like most killers, he would want his acts to be noticed.

The letters pages were a very likely source of clues. Cindy flicked open an issue of Pagan Quest .

Dear Sir, I have been a worshipper of Thor for over nine years and have recently moved to Basingstoke, where I am anxious to contact fellow pagans…

Most of them, unfortunately, were on this level. Cindy wondered if there were any submitted letters that the editors of these magazines considered too extreme for publication. He’d had no reply from Marcus Bacton at The Phenomenologist . But perhaps that had not been such a great idea. The journal only came out at three- monthly intervals, so even if its staid and ageing readers had any ideas, it might be Christmas before they appeared.

‘Kelvyn, who was that boy we met in Gloucester who wanted to interview me? Long, red hair.’

‘Jasper somebody, wasn’t it?’

‘His mag was called … No, it wasn’t Jasper, you stupid bird, it was Gareth, Gareth Milburn, and the mag was called Cauldron … Crucible !’

Cindy leafed through a copy of a pagan magazine in which other, smaller pagan magazines tended to place small ads.

‘Here we are, Kelvyn … Crucible ! Oh, and a phone number, there’s unusual.’

Cindy prodded out the number on his mobile.

‘Blessed be! You’re through to Crucible. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you … one way or another, ha, ha, ha.’

‘Gareth, it’s Cindy Mars-Lewis, the humble thespian you were so determined to out as a pagan earlier this year …’

Cindy hung up, unsatisfied, restless. There must be something else he could do.

‘What’s your hurry, old fool?’

‘I don’t know. I feel …’

Cindy picked up his pendulum, slipped a middle finger through the loop.

‘… I feel it’s getting closer.’

When held over the maps at each of the murder spots, the pendulum reacted in exactly the same way: a furious anti-clockwise spin. What would Hatch say to that?

You’re making it do that, he’d say scornfully. Even if you’re not doing it consciously, something inside you wants it to happen.

Of all the extra-sensory disciplines, dowsing was the most widely accepted. It began with the practical skill of water-divining, but no-one knew where it ended, how deep it would go in its search for hidden truths. Sometimes, it seemed to be simply a way of communicating to your conscious mind something that you already subconsciously knew. Other times, as the great T. C. Lethbridge had first demonstrated, it could be your link with different levels of existence and, perhaps, with some great cosmic database from which information could be gathered.