Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘Though we’ve nothing against that, obviously,’ Matthew said hurriedly. ‘But this is going to be a proper Christian service. There’s a chap we know who was ordained and practised as a curate before he sort of … dropped out.’

‘As your father would say.’ Janny giggled.

‘Actually, he was a friend of my father’s. Used to turn up and camp on our sofa for days at a time, and the old man got a bit annoyed, but he is a real clergyman. Sort of.’

Grayle shook her head, mystified.

‘My mother’s a bit disgusted with us, actually,’ Matthew said. ‘Wanted the full church bit. But they don’t realize these places were the original churches. I mean, the number of churches actually built inside stone circles or in places where there used to be circles or on top of Bronze Age mounds … I mean, a holy place is a holy place. Energy is energy.’

‘And something really joyous like a wedding is really giving some energy back to the earth.’

The stones were all around Janny and Matthew like an open mouth full of decaying teeth. Grayle couldn’t imagine there being joy here.

‘It’d be lovely if you could come, if you’re still around,’ Janny said. ‘We did invite Ersula, but …’

‘Right,’ Grayle said dismally.

On an evening like this, the village was made of stone and smoke.

The first fires had been lit on the cottage hearths — lit with abandon because the log-piles were high. The first amber lights were showing in the cottages, and an ice-blue fluorescence stuttered from the deep freeze in the village shop.

Easing the elderly Morris Minor across the stone bridge over the young but apparently seldom rebellious river Monnow and into the core of the village, Cindy felt unexpectedly nervous and stopped a while, with the windows cranked down, to watch and listen. And perhaps absorb, through secret pores, the essence.

An overcast sky. October, that most mysterious and numinous of months, was really beginning to be October, the land vibrating with the subtle lights of nearness .

The warped sign of the Ram’s Head creaked in the breeze — perhaps it would be best to stay there tonight, if there was a room available — and, above it all, the warm clangour of bell practice was there to sustain and protect the ancient spirit, like cupped hands over a candle.

It was a night to drink cider and drowse by the ingle-nook in the pub, to the mellow thud of darts and the rumble of country laughter.

But not for Cindy, who was here to investigate a death.

No wonder that, when he had asked the pendulum Where will it happen next? it had not responded to the Welsh border. Because it had already happened .

And this time there was nothing particularly suspicious. An old lady had wandered away, disoriented no doubt, and died of a stroke. No intensive police investigation, no forensics, no scenes of crime people, no orange tape. Cindy would be free to examine Marcus Bacton’s beloved High Knoll burial chamber without either being interrupted or the risk of further falling foul of the constabulary.

Perhaps an hour of daylight remained. He would go at once.

To find out, if he could, how a place of light had become a place of death.

‘For you.’ Marcus thrust the phone through a morass of books and typescript. ‘Some woman.’

With Mrs Willis gone, the study was a mess. Unwashed teacups, and biscuit crumbs stuck to used whisky glasses. Verging on the squalid. Even worse than Maiden’s flat, but his offer to help clean the place up had led to a brusque invitation to fuck off back to the cottage and keep his nose out.

The inquest had been opened and adjourned very rapidly, no uncomfortable questions — everyone apparently accepting, as Maiden had thought they would, that old dears sometimes died in unusual places. So the body was available for burial, throwing Marcus into a state about how the hell you organized a funeral, who you invited, all this sort of bloody palaver.

‘A woman asking, somewhat coyly in my view, for a Mr Lazarus,’ Marcus said.

For Maiden, the squalor instantly mellowed to somewhere around cosily chaotic.

‘Still alive, then,’ Emma Curtis said.

Now he was alive. ‘Where you calling from?’

‘Yeah, don’t worry, I got that message. Your fairy godmother, the Rottweiler of Elham General … we’ve had coffee a couple of times. She thought you were being paranoid. Not me, baby, I know these reptiles too well. Hence, I’m in the phone booth inside the public bloody library. Late night opening. Listen, I just popped into the reading room for a glance at the Elham Messenger , just out. It says … hang on, let me fold the thing … it says your condition is giving cause for concern and you’re believed to have been transferred to some specialist neurological unit in Brum. Unnamed, naturally.’

‘I’m a cabbage ?’

‘Also, the paper suggests the police are having second thoughts about a hit-and-run. It’s believed there is a real possibility that no third party was involved. Looks like you fell off the kerb, Bobby. Pissed again, I expect.’

‘Bloody Riggs. Who’s that guy he knows at the Messenger ?’

‘Roger Gibbs. What it is, Gibbs is next in line for Grand Worshipful thingy at the Lodge. Simple as that. Or so Vic says. Vic knows these things. Hey, you sound better.’

‘All the better, as they say, for hearing you. Perhaps, er, perhaps we need to meet. Do you think? Discuss the whole situation in greater depth.’

‘The whole situation? Are you up to discussing the whole situation?’

‘In depth,’ Maiden said.

‘Really. Oh, well … No, hang on, there’s a bloke outside. Just a bloke, I think, but we can’t be too careful. Well, yes, I thought I could come down. Take you for a little outing. Uncle.’

‘That would be very nice, my dear. When might one expect to be exposed to your delightful company?’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Ah. We do have a funeral tomorrow.’

‘Well, maybe you might need cheering up after that. Change of scene. What if I were to make a reservation for you and a friend at some primitive but homely B and B for tomorrow night? Would that help your recovery? Hey, the good Sister said she’d sent you a black eyepatch. Why do we find black eyepatches dead sexy, Bobby, can you tell me? I mean, Long John Silver ?’

Down the steep lane went the intrepid Morris Minor, putter, putter, putter .

It was like going down a rabbit hole, the banks high each side, trees growing from the tops of the banks and tangling overhead, filtering the already meagre light through a dark green grille. At the bottom, you could almost miss the house, the way the single-track road swung round to the right, and the house was down a short track on the left, tree-screened.

Cindy stepped on the brakes and backed up. Ornate gold lettering on a black board read, Cefn-y-bedd. The University of the Earth .

Cindy saw lights coming on in the house behind the trees; what were they up to there?

The University of the Earth . Most of what he knew about this enterprise had been gleaned from the obviously biased pages of The Phenomenologist . It did, though, sound more than a little irresponsible, offering to connect students and holidaymakers to the inner mind of the planet. It would seem entirely innocuous, of course, to Falconer, an academic, a sceptic, a man who apparently believed there was nothing out there more powerful than his own intellect.

How could these people know so much and yet so little? Cindy had read some of the man’s learned articles but not seen his apparently more populist television programme. Life was too short to spend in the company of sceptics.