Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Cindy flung the Morris into gear, accelerated away in first, Marcus howling that he was going the wrong way, should have turned round on the pub forecourt.

‘Scene of the crime,’ Cindy said softly. ‘I would like to see the scene of the crime.’

Bobby’s shoulders jerked at this, but he said nothing. The old car made it to fifty mph with a horrible metallic shriek. Two minutes later, Cindy slowed at a sign which said Hotel/Gwesty .

‘This the place, is it, lovely?’

‘Look.’ Bobby’s voice parched as a ditch in August. ‘I’m sorry about this. I panicked. Should’ve driven the BMW to the police station in Abergavenny. If you go back that way, you could drop me outside.’

Marcus leaned over from the back seat. ‘Makes sense, Lewis.’

Cindy stopped the car just inside the hotel gates but didn’t switch off the engine, which juddered, shaking the whole car. He reached up to turn on the feeble interior light.

‘That way neither of you are involved,’ Bobby said, pale as death. ‘I’ll just tell them I thumbed a lift into town. Drop me at the station, drive away, no risk of anyone-’

‘All of life …’ Cindy lowered the handbrake and the car lumbered a little further up the drive. ‘… is one delectable risk after another.’

An old house came into view, more stately, less rambling than, say, Cefn-y-bedd. Security floodlights shot emerald rays across the bowling-green lawns.

‘You realize,’ Marcus said, ‘that if this engine cuts out, as it seems in imminent danger of doing, you’ll never get it going again, and then we’ll all be …’

‘Sixteenth century at least,’ Cindy mused. ‘Probably older. Possibly much older.’

‘Look, if you want to come on like Nicholas bloody Pevsner, let’s make it some other time, shall we? Just turn this heap of scrap round and get your dainty little fucking foot down.’

The front door of the hotel opened. A man peered out towards them, shading his eyes against the floodlights.

‘Night porter,’ Bobby said. ‘He’ll get your number.’

‘In that case, I hope you paid your bill, lovely.’ Cindy put on the headlights, full beam, and you could see that the night porter’s jacket was green and Marcus grabbed Cindy’s shoulder from behind.

‘Are you completely bloody mad?’

‘Abergavenny police station,’ Bobby said. ‘Ten minutes.’

‘So that you can confess to murder? Because, see, I really think you ought to confess to me first. I’m your fairy godmother. Talk to me, lovely.’

‘Go, Cindy.’

‘Turn the engine off, then, I will, if you want time to think about it.’ Cindy leaned back and reached for the keys.

‘At your fucking peril …’ Marcus snarled.

The night porter was strolling across the grass towards them.

‘Did I kill her? You want to know?’

‘All the time in the world, lovely.’

The night porter took what appeared to be a notepad from his top pocket.

‘No,’ Bobby said. ‘For what it’s worth.’

‘Worth the Earth, it is.’ Cindy cut the headlights, slammed into gear, let out the clutch with a bang and reversed her in a long, orgasmic scream.

Bobby breaking down into dry sobs, poor dab.

They’d walked up by the light of the stars and the cold, cynical moon. Cindy up front, carrying the canvas suitcase, followed by Marcus in an old naval duffel coat with a hiker’s backback and Malcolm on a lead and Bobby Maiden, wearing a lumpy old tweed jacket of Marcus’s over a white T-shirt and sweatpants.

Cindy bent to set down the candle-lantern at the end of the big stone, and the light shone out, as if from the prow of some fossilized sailing ship.

Maiden was unsure why they were here. He remembered going back to Castle Farm. Marcus throwing logs on the stove. Cindy giving him some herbal drink to calm him.

He did feel calmer. Calmer than he’d any right to feel.

‘Why?’

Cindy straightened up, face gaunt and hollowed like eroded stone in the lonely light, and there was something about Cindy Maiden couldn’t fathom.

‘To sleep, Bobby. And perchance — as I was never considered suitable to confide to an audience in even the meanest repertory outfit — perchance to dream. You, that is. Not us. All right?’

‘What was in the drink?’

He didn’t remember changing. He didn’t know what had happened to his bloodied clothes, but it was Em’s blood and he wanted them back. To be stained with Em’s blood for ever.

She thought it was me. She must have died thinking it was me .

‘What was in the drink?’

‘Nothing a doctor wouldn’t prescribe, and with fewer side-effects. Relax, Bobby, you won’t be seeing pink tigers. Right, then, children …’ Cindy pulled from his case some kind of plastic sheet. ‘Let’s examine our situation.’

Cindy and Marcus laid the sheet on the grass and weighed it down with a couple of small stones and the suitcase. Cindy made them sit down, their backs to one of the huge supporting stones of the burial chamber, which looked bigger at night and less like a ruin. Maiden remembered Grayle Underhill and her ghost and that seemed a very long time ago.

‘Been talking about you, we have, Bobby.’ Cindy gazed beyond the small circle of light. ‘On the basis that you know more than you have been able to tell us. More than you know you know, if I am making myself clear.’

Maiden hadn’t realized until he sat down how tired he was. His head nodded, although he knew there was some reason he shouldn’t sleep.

‘Bobby!’ Cindy’s hands clapping his face. ‘Not yet, lovely. Listen. Listen to me. We’re going to take a leaf out of Professor Falconer’s book.’

‘Bastard borrowed the bloody book, anyway,’ Marcus said.

‘Sister Anderson told you, did she not, how she brought into play the light of High Knoll in the moments before your heart was restarted, yes? We believe that you were exposed, in those moments, to what we might call the night side of these stones. And something lodged in what, to avoid a more contentious word, I will call your subconscious mind. What I want to do now is take you back, using the dream techniques employed by the professor and his people. Are you familiar?’

Maiden shook his head.

Cindy explained simply.

‘Whatever,’ Maiden said, long past caring. ‘Whatever.’

Cindy nodded, stood up, grabbed the suitcase from the plastic sheet and strode off into the darkness.

After a while, Malcolm howled suddenly, once, his wedge-shaped head inclined to the starry sky.

Marcus patted him. ‘Settle down, old son. He’s just a bloody old ham.’

‘Where’s he gone?’ Maiden wondered.

‘Fuck knows.’

Behind them, the chamber was a primeval altar on fat legs. It had cracks and fissures, filled with black shadow now, where the wan candlelight could not penetrate. Maiden put out a hand and touched the stone for the first time and recoiled. It really wasn’t that cold. As though blood was pumping through it.

‘Maiden, you-’

‘Sorry, Marcus?’

‘You couldn’t have hallucinated the whole thing, could you? I mean, this woman. This … butchery.’

‘Due to brain damage? And lack of sleep? And she’s really still alive?’

Marcus said nothing.

‘And the blood?’

‘Sorry.’ Marcus rubbed his eyes. ‘Never had anything to do with anything like this before. Who do you think …?’

‘It was a kind of accident, Marcus. It was supposed to be me.’

In the blackness of his heart of hearts, even he wants you popped now … Killed, then . Killed. All right?

‘Not this bent-copper nonsense?’