Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Or was it? Why had he urged Andy to get the old girl off the stone? He didn’t know, then or now. Why had he felt so uncomfortable at the place you had to be careful, in front of Marcus, not to call Black Knoll?

‘So no-one’s going to know she was Annie Davies?’

Marcus held up the letter in frustration. ‘Bastards,’ he said.

Maiden wasn’t quite sure who he meant. Perhaps he meant everybody.

Even though they’d agreed that he was Bobby Wilson, Marcus’s nephew, over for the funeral of a woman he’d come to regard as a granny figure, Maiden never went down to the village. Instead, he took long, uneven walks among the hills around St Mary’s, across this strange no man’s land between England and Wales — pink soil and stone, autumn fires on the fields under the dark mantelpiece of the mountains.

Lying down in the grass, a west wind on his face, he thought about the kind of things he wanted to respond to. He thought about painting again. And he thought about Emma Curtis.

The second night, Marcus banged on the cottage door to say Andy was on the phone for him. Police had been waiting for her at home. Wondering if she had any idea of the whereabouts of their missing colleague, about whom they were a little worried.

Also wondering where she’d been, perhaps.

Maiden took the call in Marcus’s study. ‘How did you handle it?’

‘Told them — Jesus God — told ‘em I’d spent the night wi’ a man friend. Refusing to disclose his name on account of he was a doctor and married.’

‘Nice one,’ Maiden said.

‘Aw, sure. Like they were gonny believe there was any doctor still young enough to work who’d take up wi’ an old bat like me.’

‘Or that you’d take up with a doctor, knowing how tired they always are.’

‘Cheeky sod. You’re sounding better, Bobby.’

‘Two nights now.’

‘Did I no tell you about the air? Anyway, I told this guy I had absolutely no idea where you might be and if they found you to bring you back at once, on account we hadn’t yet given your head the all-clear.’

Maiden gazed into the flames jetting between flaking logs in Marcus’s woodstove. ‘Who was this?’

‘CID guy. Sergeant. Said he was a friend of yours.’

‘Mike Beattie?’

‘Aye. Trust him at all?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I did say you’d been very mixed up and restless and it was no big surprise to learn you’d skipped out. That all right for you?’

‘That’s fine. Just one thing. Maybe you could avoid ringing here from home. Call boxes are best.’

‘Aw, hey, come on … they wouldnae-’

‘They might,’ Maiden said. ‘They just might. I mean, if they already are doing, we’re stuffed. But these things can take time to fiddle.’

Amid the clutter on Marcus’s desk of beaten-up mahogany lay a new hardback book with a dark cover and big, silver lettering: Beyond Roswell: The Paranoid Decades .

‘And maybe … I don’t like to ask this, but is there any way you could avoid coming down for the funeral?’

‘They could follow me?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Well,’ Andy said bitterly, ‘if you explain to Marcus. Don’t imagine I’d be missed. I’m no bloody good to her now, am I?’

When he put down the phone, Marcus was furiously polishing his glasses. He put them on and glared through them.

‘Maiden, what kind of shit have you got that woman into?’

Putting himself between Maiden and the stove. He had on what seemed to be his usual leisurewear, which included a long blue cardigan and a mustard bow tie. It had grown dark outside and the fire accounted for most of the light in the room.

‘If you’re going to use my house as some sort of bunker, you can at least tell me precisely why. Am I going to wake up to find the place surrounded by some fucking task force with loud hailers and automatic rifles?’

‘I think we can rule out the armed response unit,’ Maiden said. ‘But that’s probably all we can rule out.’

‘Going to sit down, are we, Maiden?’ Marcus smiled threateningly. ‘Have a drink?’

‘No thanks. No good for head injuries, apparently.’

He found a sofa. Marcus dragged a bottle of Teachers’ whisky and a tumbler from his desk and slumped with them into an easy chair by the stove, white stuffing spurting out of the seat as though the chair was frothing at the mouth.

‘Entertain me,’ he said. ‘Remembering that I spent thirty years interrogating schoolboys. World’s most convincing liar, the schoolboy.’

‘Well …’ Maiden sank into a dusty, brocaded cushion. ‘The bottom line is, I suspect my superior officer would like me out of the picture.’

‘You are out of the picture. You’re eighty miles away. If you mean dead, Maiden, say it.’

‘Dead, then.’

‘Why, precisely?’

Maiden said, ‘For being possibly the only copper in Elham division who hasn’t at some time, to some extent, been on the take.’

Yes, he thought. It is that simple.

Marcus leaned forward, firelight gleaming fiercely in his heavy spectacles. Then he poured himself a Scotch.

‘That’s it, then, is it?’ he said. ‘I mean, do forgive me, Maiden, but I was rather expecting something to test the imagination.’

Only later, when Marcus was too drunk and maudlin to handle and he was trudging across the yard to the cottage, did Maiden realize this hadn’t been sarcasm.

‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Maiden.’ Marcus holding out his tumbler and gazing into the whisky as if it was the true elixir of life. ‘But you snuffed it, didn’t you?’

‘Apparently.’

‘And dear old Anderson coaxed you back from the Other Place when everybody was ready to pull the plug, have you bagged up and put in a big drawer or whatever they do. Doesn’t that make you think? I mean, you now know that there’s something beyond death. Does that not change your whole life, utterly and completely? Doesn’t it blow your mind? Doesn’t it make you think, here I am, a snivelling little detective getting all worked up about a bunch of bent coppers, when there are real mysteries all around. Mysteries so close, so damned intimate … that most people, especially policemen, never even focus on them. Big mysteries. Don’t you ever feel overwhelmingly excited? Humble, even?’

He didn’t want to answer that. Didn’t want to confess to feeling, in what was supposed to be his soul, a coldness and a bleakness and a complete absence of hope.

Marcus sank a quantity of whisky. ‘I was a teacher, Maiden.’

‘Never have guessed.’

‘Something happened to you. Like the thing that happened to Mrs Willis on High Knoll on her thirteenth birthday. Now, in all of the six decades of my life on Planet Earth, while the way we live has changed and worsened out of all recognition, I have never had anything that could be described as a vaguely mystical or paranormal experience. Which is why I run a spotty little magazine devoted to it. If I had had any kind of experience, I’d be out there living it … doing things, making things happen . But, then, you know what they say about teachers.’

Maiden said, after a barely respectful pause, ‘Them as can do, them as can’t … teach.’

‘Which is why people like you make me sick. You died , Maiden. You died. And you came back. And what the holy fuck are you doing about it? ‘

Folklore. There was a whole lot of it around the Rollright Stones, Matthew Lyall said, and most of it was pretty sinister stuff.

The circle sure looked sinister today, with a black cloud the shape of a bathtub hanging over it, and these stalky pines; Grayle never had liked pines, they were too aloof, blocked out the sun but never seemed to offer you shelter. Pines didn’t care.