Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

Or lose it.

Aw, come on …

For once, the door fell open easily. Due, maybe, to the other hand above hers on the panel.

‘After you, Mrs Anderson.’

The big guy pushing her inside, shouldering the door shut behind him, flashing the credentials in her face.

‘Police, Mrs Anderson. Superintendent Riggs.’

Marcus faced himself in the bathroom mirror, tying today’s bow tie, the sea-green one. The considered formality of the exercise was supposed to give him a grip on the day. And, by Christ, this was a day that needed a grip.

He’d drunk four cups of strong tea and had a shower. Hadn’t helped much.

Cindy the bloody Shaman was still on the premises. Supposed to be sleeping on the sofa in the study, but Marcus had awoken to hear the sound of the TV from down there.

Marcus looked out at the castle walls in the white morning. How those ruins had excited him a few years back. Now, just a crumbling pile of medieval dereliction you were legally obliged to keep from crumbling further. Age and erosion. Enough of that in the bloody mirror.

He went downstairs. It was strangely quiet. No sign of the appalling Shaman, but the sofa had its cushions neatly arranged, as only a woman or a raging poof would leave it.

Malcolm ambled over. ‘All right,’ Marcus said. ‘Fair enough.’ He put on his jacket and they walked out across the old farmyard. ‘Come here, dog. Don’t shit in the bloody ruins.’

Wanting it all to look pretty for the estate agent’s camera.

The dog followed him over the stile onto the footpath through the meadow. Marcus kept his eyes on the grass a few yards in front of him. No longer wanted to look up at High … no, dammit … Black Knoll.

‘You bloody idiot!’ he bawled out suddenly. ‘You bloody old fool!’

Couldn’t believe he’d gone along with last night’s bollocks.

Take you back … to the minutes of your death . The trick was the high drama, the scene-setting. The cloak and the candle. The senses fuddled by lack of sleep. Anyone would be hallucinating at the end of a night like that.

Marcus remembered all that buzz back in the seventies about the psychic surgeons of the Philippines or somewhere, who’d produce handfuls of intestines without the customary incision. Bollocks. A conjuring trick. Lewis had pulled off something similar last night: wake you up, get you into a panic thinking Maiden’s dying, and then …

Conjuring trick.

‘Bollocks!’

The mountains were hard as prison walls. He needed to be miles away. In a town. With traffic and fumes and the sound of kids he used to teach, now ram-raiding Curry’s.

‘Marcus?’

He stopped. Because he’d had his eyes on the ground, he hadn’t noticed he wasn’t alone in the meadow.

A still figure in white stood a few yards away. Unearthly, somehow, because it was so unexpected. The dog strolled over, tail waving.

‘Get you some tea?’

‘Thank you, Mrs Anderson, I don’t think I can spare the time.’

‘Busy man, huh?’

Riggs didn’t reply. She’d seen him a few times at the hospital. Big guy who seemed even taller the way he carried himself: with dignity — whatever you heard about Riggs you’d never believe it to look at him. And — face it — very few had heard anything, only the likes of Bobby and Emma Curtis and Vic Clutton.

He wasn’t smiling and yet he was. There was one big, smug smile fizzing away inside this guy, she could feel the heat of it. Mr Riggs was on a roll. Mr Riggs was focused.

‘Time to stop playing, Mrs Anderson.’

‘I don’t have time to play. I’m a working woman.’

Standing in the living room doorway in his bulky leather coat. An energy in him, all right. It made her nervous; she hated that.

‘Let me come to the point, Sister,’ Riggs said, loud enough for them to hear next door. ‘I believe you know where my officer is.’

‘Your officer?’

‘Maiden,’ Riggs said patiently. ‘Bobby Maiden.’

‘No my responsibility.’ Andy wrinkled her nose. ‘He walked off the ward. As was his right, but anything happens to the guy after that, it’s no our problem.’

‘My understanding is that you considered Bobby to be very much your problem.’ Leather creaked, Riggs flexing his shoulders. ‘My understanding is that you established quite a rapport.’

‘You have to do your best. With Bobby, his senses were a wee bit fuddled. Wouldnae surprise me if he had no memory of me at all by now.’ Looking straight up into Riggs’s tawny eyes. ‘Wherever he is.’

‘Where did he go, Mrs Anderson?’

‘Like he’d tell me?’

‘If you were with him, he wouldn’t need to tell you. According to Detective Sergeant Beattie, you were rather evasive about your own whereabouts on the night Bobby disappeared.’

‘Aw, come on …’ Andy spreading her hands, laughing. ‘You think Bobby and me ran away together or something? Jesus God, his head was no that messed up. His eyesight was fine.’

‘No.’ Riggs smiled. ‘I didn’t imagine for one minute that you and he were … romantically connected. If so, he was two-timing you. With a woman named Emma Curtis.’

She tried not to react. Telling herself she didn’t know an Emma Curtis.

‘‘But it’s over now,’ Riggs said. ‘I think I can say that.’

‘Aye?’

‘Last night, Bobby Maiden and Emma Curtis booked into the Collen Hall Hotel in South Wales.’

‘Really?’ Andy’s brain racing. What was going on?

‘Under the name Mr and Mrs Lazarus.’

‘Neat,’ Andy said. And why was Riggs on his own? Superintendents never went around without a sergeant or two in tow, maybe a couple of uniform guys. Bearing in mind what Bobby had to say about Riggs, how official was this?

‘You heard from Bobby Maiden this morning, Mrs Anderson?’

‘What the hell is this about? No, I haven’t. Why should I? What’s goin’ on?’

Riggs’s eyes were searching the room.

‘Mr Riggs, I just got off shift, I’m very tired.’

‘Does your radio work?’

‘Why, you follow The Archers or something?’

‘A little early for The Archers , as I recall. But we might catch the eight o’clock news. May I …?’

Andy shrugged. Riggs fiddled with the radio. They heard some stuff about a row at the Labour Party conference. Riggs sniffed.

‘I’ll tell you this much, Sister Anderson. If you do know where Maiden is, and you fail to tell me while you have the chance, I’ll have you in.’

‘Have me in? Listen, pal, either you bloody tell me right now what this is about, or I’ll have you out.’

‘On suspicion of being an accessory,’ Riggs said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

‘To what? Jesus God, you bust in here-’

‘Ah!’ Riggs lifted a finger. ‘Here we are. I think you’d better sit down.’

The dog wagging his tail. Going right up to Maiden and Maiden kneeling down on the grass. Greeting each other like old friends after an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Tears in Maiden’s eyes again. Both eyes exposed, the patch gone, the bad eye still purple. Maiden still in the sweatpants and the white T-shirt that said something about Fun .

‘Time is it, Marcus?’ White-faced, bloodless lips.

‘Oh … Eightish. I suppose.’

Maiden stood up slowly. Looked like something that rolled off a mortuary trolley.

Poor sod.

In the dawn, he’d followed them down from the Knoll, hadn’t said a word. Nobody had. Back at the farm, Maiden had gone directly to the cottage — he’d need to sleep the bloody clock round after last night. And then what? God knew, Marcus didn’t.

‘What’s happened?’ Couldn’t have had more than two hours’ sleep and here he was wandering the fields like a lost soul. ‘What’s happened, Marcus?’