Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘That’s her.’ Grayle felt tearful. On top of it all she felt tearful. Get a hold .

Marcus said, ‘I found her, to be honest, rather pushy. As though she had a right to whatever information I could give her. You began to feel like a sucked lemon after a while, though you had to admire her persistence.’

Grayle said, ‘Did you try to discourage her from sleeping at High Knoll?’

‘No. Why should I? If it could bring out the healer in a naive thirteen-year-old girl, it couldn’t be the evil, heathen place of local superstition and ecclesiastical prejudice, could it? And it … She was clearly doing it for her own research, nothing to do with Falconer’s crowd-pulling schemes.’

‘Did you see her again after she spent a night there?’

‘No. I did ask her to let me know what happened, but … Well, she was looking for a scientific explanation of Annie’s vision. Electromagnetism in the stone, low-level radiation … anything which might have stimulated the brain into hallucination mode or whatever she called it. I presumed she hadn’t had any quantifiable results.’

‘She didn’t strike you as kind of … you know … unbalanced?’

‘Absolutely not. Girl was a human database.’

‘Did she say how she might follow through with all of this? Any other place she might have been planning to visit?’

‘While she was here, she seemed to be focused entirely on High Knoll. The vision of the Virgin, all that.’

‘The unknowable,’ Cindy said. ‘The ineffable light. Such things happen, lovelies. They do.’

‘Ersula was drawn to that,’ Grayle said. ‘The whole Virgin-goddess thing. Ersula has always been a feminist, right from about age two.’

‘Two sides,’ Cindy said. ‘The ineffable light and the unutterable evil. The question we should be asking is, what — or who — has tipped the balance towards the latter?’

‘The black light,’ Marcus said bleakly.

‘Indeed.’

‘Only mentioned it a few days before she died. If I thought of it, I suppose I regarded it as subjective. Psychological. A reflection of the state of her health.’

Well, dear.’ Cindy stood up, easing his feet out of the sensible walking shoes, gliding to the window and looking out into the nothingness of the night. ‘Perhaps it was. If she was drawing energy, inspiration, call it what you will, from the Knoll and the energy there had been negated …’

‘Then she’d be like a diver whose air pipe was blocked,’ Marcus said.

‘And if, the night she died, she went back there, determined to un block …’

Marcus poured himself some whisky and drank it. ‘And now she’s dead and frozen out, just as she was for most of her life. Betrayed. Stuck in some sepia limbo. I can’t bear it.’

Suzanne would not have worn it.

Suzanne’s would have been short and black, possibly shiny.

This nightgown said, as explicitly as you could get, no more Suzanne .

She stood in the bathroom doorway, the light behind her. No lights on in the bedroom, where Maiden sat, still fully dressed, on the edge of the four-poster bed.

Out of place in a house this old, the four-poster was patently fake, with posts of ‘antique’ pine and dusky pink-frilled curtains. A bottle of house champagne, with a big, red bow, unopened on one of the bedside tables. A ‘quaint medieval’ sign warning, DO NOT DISTURB , hanging, undisturbed, from the door handle inside the room.

Naff trappings of the honeymoon suite.

But nothing naff about Em Curtis. Her hair was covering her shoulders, hiding the tops of her breasts. Her nightgown of magnolia silk, long enough to cover her feet, had long, wide sleeves ending in little ropes.

He stood up. He was shaking. She glided like some Tudor ghost down the two thickly carpeted steps from the bathroom and halfway into his arms.

‘I’m not questioning it,’ Maiden said hoarsely. ‘I died. I’m entitled to go to heaven.’

A finger on his lips.

‘Not another word, Bobby. Close your eyes.’

Bringing her lips close to his but not quite touching, except with her soft wine-breath.

Presently, he felt slender, ringless hands moving under his sweatshirt, skimming his skin.

Life after death. There was life after death.

A scarred moon hung diffidently outside the stone-sunk mullioned window of room five. A moon which had seen too much of this and didn’t want to get involved.

‘But it’s OK,’ Em said. ‘Really.’

Maiden felt his hand would leave a filthy smut on her skin and he took it away.

She pulled it back. ‘Don’t.’

‘I don’t know what to do,’ Maiden said.

‘Hey,’ she said, ‘I was half expecting it, you want the truth. Christ, when I think of all the things that happened to you … knocked down, beaten up … it’s a wonder you …’ Interweaving her fingers with his. ‘Anyway, it’s OK, it really is OK, Bobby. All right?’

‘I don’t think …’ He didn’t want to talk about it; all the words were like cardboard cut-outs. ‘I don’t think you understand.’

‘Come on, guv’nor, don’t say it never happened before. There isn’t a bloke alive it never happened to. Certainly not someone as messed up and threatened and … Bobby, relax . ‘

‘I’m sorry.’

‘And look, we’re here. I’m happy. Believe it. When you went away — ask Vic, Vic knows — I wasn’t functioning. I’ve thought about this a lot. I mean, I didn’t want to get this wrong, because I’ve got enough things wrong in my life …’

‘Listen, let me tell you, Emma, whatever else you got wrong was as-’

‘And I kept on asking myself, could it have been the excitement of it? Because it was exciting, all that Suzanne stuff; you create a fantasy and you want it to go on. I wanted to tidy up your flat, put your pictures on the walls … Christ, they were so lonely , those pictures. So, you see, I wanted to be sure it wasn’t the romance of all that . ‘

‘Romance?’

‘You don’t see it, do you?’

‘Sorry.’

‘The loner? The misfit? Dark, good-looking, trapped in a world where he doesn’t belong … Oh, God, yes . And now an eyepatch . ‘

Clutching his hand to her breast. The breast, surely, felt warm and wonderful; it was the hand that felt like dead meat.

‘We’re all Mills and Boonies at heart,’ she said.

‘That’s why so many women get murdered,’ Maiden said. ‘Didn’t you know? Fascination with the lone, moody … psycho.’

‘Crime-prevention hint number 486. Thank you, Inspector.’

‘No more inspector. That’s all over.’

‘I wonder if it is. Hey, listen, I think I want to meet your dad. I want to meet Norman Plod.’

‘Christ.’

‘I’ve been thinking about him a lot. I reckon he’s probably got a secret. Something like the paintings, only different. Something he had to hide. He’s your old man, after all, he can’t be totally insensitive.’

‘No?’

‘All down to genetics.’

‘You’re wrong. He’s profoundly insensitive. If he was here now, he’d be sneering.’

‘I will never sneer. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Oh God, look,’ Maiden said, wanting to cry. ‘Piss off out of this while you can. Please?’

‘No chance,’ Em said softly. ‘ No chance.’

‘I thought it was going to be all right, I was convinced tonight … But it’s not … going … to be … all right. I really want you to just, just … be out of it. Because-’

‘You’re full of shit, Bobby.’

‘You don’t know how much.’

‘We can get rid of it.’