Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Sometimes, as Cindy had found, the pendulum would spin like a propeller, a preliminary to shamanic flight … as when he’d held it over the spot in the Elan Valley in mid-Wales where the barbed-wire trap had been laid.

On a whim, Cindy spread out the pagan and earthmagic magazines in a circular fan formation and held the pendulum over the table.

He closed his eyes. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘tell me. Which one of these, if any, will guide me towards the person who killed Maria Capaldi?’

Emptying his mind, letting conscious thoughts blow away like leaves.

Knowing, before he opened his eyes, that the pendulum was spinning furiously.

But over The Phenomenologist ?

Cindy was sceptical. He was fond of the archaic publication, although under the editorship of this man Bacton it had become a little political, even angry sometimes. Still, there was always some message to be gleaned from the action of the pendulum. Perhaps it was time to telephone Bacton.

But what about the big question? He collected up all the magazines, put them in a pile on the floor and opened up his map of Britain on the tabletop. He sat upright, a hand on each knee, the pendulum under his right hand. He rotated his head a few times to relax the neck muscles, did some brief tensing and relaxation on the arms and legs, stomach and back, and followed this with some chakra-breathing, three times round the seven points, until he felt light and separated and glowing.

Then he began to visualize the islands from afar. The sound of the sea and the gulls through the open window lifting him. Feeling the air currents under his wings.

Flying.

Over the New Forest to the glade where a girl lay impaled …

… across the scrubbed mid-Wales hills to the flooded valleys, following the line of the oakwood, faster and faster, into the sudden whiplash snap and twang of barbed wire …

… spinning back across the English border, the tension of Offa’s Dyke … the flash of rivers, the bulging of hills, the bright, hot grille of the ley lines …

… towards Clee Hill and the timber-framed market town … above a cobbled street to a doorway, bloodied cardboard in the pink dawn … and up again and down the border until he felt …

… three twitches from Harold’s Stones and the choking terror of a girl, thumbs in her larynx …

… Across the Marlborough Downs, over old crop circles, feeling the magnetic, goose-pimpling pull of the still-pulsing Avebury henge, hovering over a field he did not know where a faceless man lay under a mask of blood …

… and then … and then …

Cindy felt his hand rising from his knee and the weight of the pendulum as it began to swing over the map. He closed his eyes.

Now.

Where will it happen next?

Later, unnerved, Cindy telephoned Marcus Bacton, editor of The Phenomenologist .

‘Marsh- what ?’

‘Mars-Lewis. We’ve never spoken before, but I pen the occasional piece for you under the name Cindy the Shaman.’

‘Oh my God. Look here, Mrs, er, Lewis, we’re a trifle old-fashioned at The Phenomenologist . Correspondents who wish to communicate with us tend to put it in writing.’

‘Just wondering, I was, Mr Bacton, if you had perused my letter regarding the murders.’

‘Oh, hell, Look, er, Lewis. One doesn’t want to bring down the heavy editorial hand, but — much as we value your contributions on Celtic shaman practices — this is not bloody True Crime Monthly.’

‘No, indeed, I understand. But I have personal reasons for continuing my investigations and it has occurred to me that you may be able to help me.’

‘Very much doubt that. Look, I’m rather up to the bloody eyes-’

‘I suspect the person I’m looking for, see — the murderer — may well, at some point, have been in communication with your periodical.’

‘Oh, right. You’re saying one of our chaps is a bloody psycho. I see. Well, what about Miss Pinder, the ectoplasm lady from Chiswick? I can just imagine her striding across the Welsh moors with a fifty-foot roll of barbed wire …’

‘Always this receptive, are you, Mr Bacton?’

‘What?’

‘No wonder your circulation is sinking so rapidly.’

‘Bloody hell! Look, Lewis. I can do without this. Things are bloody fraught enough just at the moment. For a start, we’ve had a rather difficult death …’

The phone seemed to freeze in Cindy’s hand.

‘Death?’

It took nearly twenty minutes and several attempts by Bacton to get him off the line, but when Cindy finally put down the phone he had learned how and where the housekeeper, Mrs Willis, had died. And that she had been a very good woman, a herbalist and a spiritual healer.

Cindy retired to bed with several back numbers of The Phenomenologist and Franklin and Job’s Guide to Prehistoric Remains on the Welsh Borders .

He already had his suitcase packed.

Marcus Bacton raged quite a bit.

His way of dealing with grief, Bobby Maiden decided. Obviously a huge hole in Marcus’s life now, and the farmhouse seemed as much of a shell as the castle outside. Yet he never spoke of Mrs Willis as anyone more than the woman who had kept his home together. And his only show of emotion was rage.

Maiden had kept well out of the way while the paramedics were around, leaving Andy as the sole official witness to the old woman’s death.

If they hadn’t taken her off the stone, it would have looked suspicious; as it was — an experienced nurse with her when she died — it was just another case of an elderly woman wandering away, the way some elderly women did, and collapsing from a stroke.

The day after Mrs Willis’s death, Andy had gone back to Elham, telling Marcus she’d return for the funeral. Examining Maiden’s eye one more time, ordering him to get a good night’s sleep.

And he had. No dreams, no sweat.

And again. Two good nights. He wanted to believe he was coming out of it; he didn’t dare. Death still hung over him but its shadow was less defined.

Andy had bathed and repatched his eye with more gauze and tape. The second day, a small parcel arrived containing a black plastic eyeshield.

Maiden put on the patch, laid low, blanked out. The holiday cottage was a good place for it, a former dairy with only three rooms and all the walls of whitewashed stone. There was a small kitchen with a hotplate and grill, and Andy had left bread and soup and fruit. He didn’t see too much of Marcus, who was making funeral arrangements, raging at the vicar, who claimed his churchyard was full and Mrs Willis wasn’t local anyway. ‘Fat bastard,’ Marcus fumed. ‘Know where he’s from? Fucking Croydon .’

‘Why don’t you tell him who she was?’

‘Because I don’t know who she was. And that’s official.’

Marcus shoved at him a letter from Mrs Willis’s solicitors, in Hereford. She’d left him five thousand pounds and requested that he should make no inquiries into her past, nor in any way speculate publicly about her.

‘Bloody typical. Unassuming to an almost perverse degree. Didn’t even like being called a healer. Less than a year ago, she cured Amy, at the pub, of bloody skin cancer. Amy knew what it was, the bloody doctors knew what it was … Mrs Willis said it was just a rash . And you’ve heard about Anderson, of course. If you can’t take the word of a trained nurse …’

And me? Maiden wondered. Did she bring me back, by proxy?

Relaxed enough, now, to consider the possibility. Almost dispassionately. He felt sorry about Mrs Willis, of course he did, just like the last hundred deaths, the accidents, the suicides, the murders. But in the end, it wasn’t his tragedy.