Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

A pigeon or something rattled in the bushes, like Cindy’s bangles on those bony wrists.

Cindy . This ageing transsexual (probably) actor, reduced to the end of the pier. Embittered by sneers, pining for applause, living half his life in a fantasy dimension where kites talk and shamans fly.

Grabbing his chance for a final blaze of public attention, Cindy invents a bizarre solution to the murder of his landlady’s daughter. Hampshire police kindly show him where the door is. He becomes obsessed. Any unsolved murder he finds in the papers, he works it into his theory. The police aren’t laughing any more; he’s become a nuisance. Finally, he’s reduced to trying to involve the failed magazine editor Marcus Bacton by convincing him there’s something unnatural about the death of his housekeeper. Only to find, conveniently staying with Marcus, another policeman. A sick, screwed-up policeman, ripe for conversion. But the policeman is sceptical. He needs to be shown the truth.

Maiden went cold. Was this it? Was this the truth? Had Cindy followed them in his old Morris Minor to Colleen Hall? Had Cindy given the performance of his life, casting himself in the role of the imaginary Ley Killer?

But he wouldn’t have had time, would he? Would Cindy have had time, after slashing Emma, to get back to St Mary’s to take the call from Maiden?

He’d been there all night. With Marcus.

No. You only assumed he had.

Maiden began to sweat with paranoia. He saw Cindy in his shamanic cloak of feathers, a giant bird of prey. In his hand a sacrificial knife. The theatrics, the melodrama. An actor manipulating reality.

A woman walked into the clearing from the other side.

Maiden dived back into the trees. She glanced his way just once. She was carrying a pickaxe. She hefted it, looked down at her feet. Swung the pick with both hands high above her head and brought it down.

So savagely that when the pick connected with the concrete all the breath came out of her in a sharp cry.

He watched her for several minutes. She was making a mess. Lumps of concrete spun across the helipad. Dust sprayed up at her flapping Barbour coat and into her dark, curly hair. She didn’t care. She pushed one point of the pick into a crack and swung back from the handle, straining.

‘ Damn you …’

The pick prised out a slab about eighteen inches across and she fell backwards, the handle clipping her under the chin. She screamed and let go and rolled over into the rubble.

‘Shit!’

Maiden walked out across the concrete. ‘Can I help?’

The woman froze on the concrete, contracting like a caterpillar, a hand at her jaw, looking up at him. For just an instant, she looked as if she might be terrified. Then she coughed and grabbed hold of the pick and came up scowling.

‘No. You can’t help. Go away. This is private land.’ She had the kind of voice that went naturally with words like private and land .

‘Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine. Piss off.’

‘Could take you a while to chop up the whole pad,’ Maiden said.

‘Are you going, or do I have to call-’

He took a chance. Call it intuition; there was something interesting here. He pulled out his wallet. It felt strange flashing the warrant card. Something the other bloke used to do before he died.

‘Police,’ he said.

She stared at him. This time the fear was real, but soon controlled. She was younger than he’d thought. Early thirties. She had a wide mouth, green eyes, the kind of take-it-for-granted, careless beauty that said breeding and then yawned.

He said, ‘And you are?’

‘Magda Ring. I work here.’

‘As?’

‘Admin manager. Controller.’

‘And the professor’s just taken off in his helicopter, and you’re fixing it so he can’t get back, right?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. I … I was …’

Maiden smiled. She really couldn’t think of an adequate explanation of why she was hacking up Falconer’s helipad.

‘Look.’ Magda Ring rose up. ‘You might be police, but this is still private land. You can either tell me what you want or bugger off.’

He overturned a slab of concrete with his shoe. Underneath, there was red soil, stone, grit.

‘It’s not very deep, is it?’

‘Why should it be?’

‘I don’t know.’ He borrowed the pick, shifted another lump. ‘I don’t know anything about helicopters. Are they very heavy?’

The pick snagged. He pulled it. It ripped through fabric. He bent and pulled out what appeared to be a sleeve; it was nylon, quilted. It smelled bad.

‘Christ,’ Magda Ring said softly. ‘How did you know? How the fuck did you know?’

He bent and lifted out a weighty concrete cube. There was most of a nylon coat down there. When he pulled more of it away, a rich, putridly familiar stench started to pulse and wriggle out of the hole. The smell was a living thing.

As always, it was Islington, two heads fallen together on a sofa, flies and kiddy porn.

Maiden turned his face to the sky, swallowed a long breath, looked down.

What you could see of the body was partly liquefied. It lay in a soupy, brown sludge. Half the face was visible, features darkened, puffed, blistering.

Magda Ring cried out once, turned and stumbled away. Maiden gagged and bit hard on the sleeve of his jacket. When he found he was starting to shake, he, too, walked away.

From the edge of the wood, like some comical, gulping birdcall, came the sound of someone vomiting. Magda on her hands and knees among the autumn mulch: burnt sienna, yellow ochre and sour pink.

He was hardly what you expected.

But come on, hen, what did you expect — black suit, slicked-back hair, white skin, Ronnie Kray rosebud lips?

Well, the black suit was right, very classy, but there wasn’t enough hair to slick back and the skin was closer to yellow. He wore thick glasses, had the manner of an old-fashioned accountant. Distant.

Distant you could understand, today. The black suit, too.

‘ Sister Anderson?’ His hand felt like the inside of a banana skin. ‘You some variety of nun?’

Andy smiled. ‘Nursing sister.’

‘Oh. Right.’

He didn’t look too well. Signs of high blood pressure, could be liver trouble, too. He was older than she’d figured, seventy maybe. How could a guy this old still be doing what they said he was doing? Young men, she could just about get her head around it — the lure of easy money, plus the illusion that you were invincible. This guy was well beyond all that.

‘Thank you for seeing me, Mr Parker. Time like this.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Tony Parker motioned to a hard chair on Andy’s side of the desk. ‘You told them downstairs it was about my …’ An eye twitched, dragging down loose skin.

‘Daughter. Aye.’ Like, how else would she have got in to see him?

‘So, go on.’ He nodded at the two black phones on his desk. ‘I’ve told them to hold all calls. ‘Cept for the wife.’

‘If it rings, I’ll go out.’

‘No need. We ain’t that close any more. She lives down in Essex. Got her sister wiv her.’

His voice was dry, his London accent trimmed. He looked like a man who didn’t cry much but spent a lot of time thinking. In Andy’s experience, crying was simpler, and much more therapeutic.

‘I’m more sorry than I can say. I’d got to know her a little. Great girl.’

‘Yeah.’ He was slumped in a high-backed swivel chair. It was the only sign of luxury in the room. The desk was scuffed, old rather than antique. Looked like it had come out of one of the old Feeny Park solicitors’ offices. There were no pictures on the walls. This was really Emma’s old man?