Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Grayle nodded, wondering if Ersula would agree.

‘We do make a bit of a show of the arguments between us,’ Adrian admitted. ‘It all adds to the fun. I mean, you know, don’t put that in your article. Which paper was it? Sorry. In one ear, out the other.’

‘Story of his life,’ said Roger.

‘The New York Courier ,’ Grayle said, hoping to God they wouldn’t check. Cautiously, she’d called herself Grayle Turner. Feeling she just might learn more if she didn’t come out as Ersula’s sister until it was absolutely necessary. ‘It’s, uh, it’s a tabloid.’

‘Don’t be ashamed of that.’ Roger laughed. ‘We had an enormously successful season after the People featured us.’

‘Kept asking me how many women had dreams about being seduced by hairy cavemen.’ Adrian produced that peculiar English laugh you could only call a chortle.

‘We have people sleeping at ancient sites under supervision,’ Roger said. ‘And recording their dreams. Adrian’s convinced that the very nature of the dreams are conditioned by magnetic and radioactive forces and who knows what else.’

‘And you’re not?’

‘I’m interested. But convinced only by evidence.’

‘We’re giving you evidence all the time.’ Adrian sounding almost exasperated. ‘We’re bombarding you with evidence.’

‘My place,’ Roger said firmly, ‘is on the fence. Until, perhaps, we have something really big to announce.’

Bobby Maiden was startled and on his guard. What was this?

The woman called Cindy — a woman Marcus had apparently never seen before — was sitting in the study, jingling her bangles and expounding some crazy theory linking together a series of apparently unconnected killings spread over half of southern Britain.

‘Some of them, see,’ this Cindy said, ‘make perfect sense. Or at least they respond to this person’s warped logic. A hunt saboteur? Yes . Because he-or she, though I think not — supports blood sports. A motorcyclist who churns up and pollutes an ancient track? Yes . A warning to the despoilers.’

‘God preserve us.’ Marcus raised his eyes, in disgust, to the yellowed ceiling.

‘But the others … well, it’s as if the victim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The boy in the doorway, the birdwatcher … you’ve seen that one in the papers? The man who was battered to death near Avebury?’

Cindy had brought out a file of notes and maps and press cuttings. Maiden imagined her arriving at some police station with this stuff, the task of getting rid of her being delegated down and down to the most junior DC. The DC wondering if there might possibly be something in this that would make his name and his boss saying, Look, son, you’ll get used to people like this … be pleasant, give her a cup of tea and get her the hell out of here.

‘I haven’t been in person to the birdwatcher site,’ Cindy said. ‘But I’d be very surprised if it wasn’t just like the others.’

‘In what way?’ Maiden was sitting at the other end of the sofa, trying not to show any professional interest. Marcus was polishing his glasses, always a danger sign.

‘On a ley,’ Cindy said. ‘All the murders have been on leys. You do know what I mean, I suppose?’

‘Remind me?’

‘My,’ said Cindy. ‘You can’t have spent much time with your uncle. Leys are straight lines — sometimes visible as ancient tracks, but mostly not — which have been found to connect prehistoric sites and some more modern buildings, like churches, which were built upon them. They appear to mark channels of spiritual energy.’

Marcus rammed on his glasses. ‘And more recently it’s been suggested that the original tracks were reserved by our remote ancestors, expressly for the passage of the spirits. So you’re trying to tell us you actually-’

‘Indeed.’ Cindy picked up two cuttings which had fallen to the floor and also a KitKat wrapper. Like she was just itching to tidy this place up.

‘You actually believe …’ Marcus tipped his chair back against the wall, Cindy’s eyes going at once to the dirty scuffmark. ‘… that someone is killing people … on leys? Deliberately ?’

‘Obvious to me, it was, from the moment I arrived at the spot where Maria Capaldi died, in the manner of William Rufus. Now known to have been a ritual death. Did you read up on that, Marcus, as I suggested?’

‘God almighty, woman, I haven’t even had the bloody time to think about it. We’ve had a death , in case you-’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was just pointing out that when the king’s body was put upon a cart and taken to Salisbury, his blood was said — this is in the account by William of Malmesbury — to have dripped to the ground the whole way.’

‘So?’

‘A line of blood, Marcus. Murray, in her book, points out that this was obviously an impossibility but that it is consistent with the belief that the blood of the Divine Victim must fall to the ground to fertilize it.’

‘So how do the others fit into this pattern? Nobody else was shot with a damned crossbow.’

Cindy shrugged. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t appropriate. My feeling is that he works intuitively. For instance, there would, to him, have been a poetic justice, a holistic justice, in the gory death of one of the motorcyclists who destroyed the Monks’ Trod in mid-Wales. Decapitated as his machine is rushing along the sacred road, spraying out a line of blood in the slipstream. The fact that it didn’t work out like that-’

‘Equally,’ Maiden said, ‘it could have been some mindless rural vigilante. Or a farmer fed up with the noise. Or an angry rambler …’

Cindy tossed him a curious glance. ‘You remind me of a friend of mine, a certain Chief Inspector Hatch.’

‘Ha!’ Marcus said.

‘Look,’ Maiden said carefully, ‘The police are not thick. But when manpower and money are tight, they tend to stick to procedure. If there’s anything in this idea, they’ll get around to it.’

‘After a few more deaths.’ An edge to Cindy’s voice now. ‘When he’s killed again and again and become careless. The problem with the police is they always look for the prosaic solution first.’

‘That’s because ninety-nine per cent of crimes are not committed by subtle people.’

‘A serial murderer’s mind is never a simple mechanism, Bobby. They are open to strange influences, see, especially now, approaching the millennium. Psychological profiling is primitive and hopelessly inadequate. Think how many apparently motiveless murders are later accounted for by the perpetrator hearing voices . ‘

‘Most of them only remember the voices after they’ve been nicked. At which stage, a psychiatric hospital often seems strangely preferable to the lifers’ wing.’

‘Never mind all this psychological bollocks,’ Marcus said irritably. ‘What I’m totally failing to bloody see is how you can conceivably link this nonsense with the natural — certified natural — death of the old lady we’re about to bury.’

Maiden shuddered.

‘Yes …’ Cindy leaned back into the sofa cushions and sighed. ‘The truth is I can’t. Not yet. That’s why I’m here. I suppose that any death linked to an ancient site is, for me, at the moment, a suspicious death, and when you told me on the telephone … Well, a few things fell together.’

‘What bloody business is it of yours anyway?’

‘Perhaps I, too, am hearing voices,’ Cindy said sadly, and Marcus finally lost patience and leapt up from his chair.

‘You’re bloody mad! You’ve just come here to try and make something out of the tragically natural death of a bloody good woman! You’re as half-baked as Miss Pinder and her bloody ectoplasm! You’re as unhinged as the old bat from Diss with the fairies in the fucking greenhouse!’ Marcus’s hands clenched. ‘Excuse me.’