Phil Rickman - The Cold Calling

‘Where is he? How long ago did he leave? Whose wedding is it? Come on, girl!’

Bobby Maiden pulled him away. ‘Cindy, this guy performs quietly. He isn’t going to do it at a bloody wedding.’

‘You don’t understand.’ Cindy whirled on him. ‘Little Grayle. Grayle Underhill was going to a wedding. You might believe in coincidences, Bobby, but in my world they don’t exist. Where’s the wedding, my love?’

‘What’s happened to his accent?’ Magda, looking scared by now, began to slide away from Cindy along the wall. ‘Why’s he gone Welsh? You two … you aren’t police at all, are you?’

‘ I am,’ Maiden said. ‘I promise you. I’ll show you-’

‘I don’t want to see your damned card again, I want to know what the hell’s going on.’

‘All right … look …’ Maiden held up one hand. ‘This guy’s a friend … contact … of Marcus Bacton’s. He’s suspected for some time that several murders in various parts of the country were down to one man, and the police didn’t want to listen. I’ve been listening. End of story.’

‘Where’s the wedding, my love?’ Cindy said insistently. ‘Which nice old pre-Reformation-church-on-an-alignment are we talking about?’

‘It’s not a church. It’s some sort of New Age nuptial thing. It’s at the Rollright Stones, in Oxfordshire.’

‘Oh, my Christ.’

‘Janny Oates, Matthew Lyall. They’re the couple. I don’t know where they live. They’ll be on our books, if you can wait. They did a course here, which is where Adrian-’

‘How long ago did he leave?’

‘Couple of hours … three hours … I don’t know. He didn’t take his Land Rover. Rushed in this morning, grabbed some things, said he had a lift.’

We can’t wait.’ Cindy rocked, tearing at his face with his fingers. ‘Bobby, we’re going. We’re going now.’

‘What about the rest of the tapes?’

‘Listen to them in the car.’ Cindy began to run across the courtyard, pulling car keys from his blazer pocket, shouting back over his shoulder. ‘She’s given him a lift . Bobby, she’s got this psychopath in her car!’

‘You’re not leaving me here!’ Magda clutched at Maiden’s jacket. ‘Not with that bloody open grave.’

‘Do you have a car?’

She nodded frantically, all sophistication abandoned.

‘Anywhere you can go?’

‘People in Hay … my new house …’

‘Do it. Don’t speak to anyone about this. Especially the police. No … Listen … give me a phone number. If you don’t hear from us by, say, seven tonight, call the police yourself. Tell them everything. Tell them where to find Ersula’s grave. Tell them … tell them DI Maiden, Bobby Maiden-’

The Morris Minor was clattering towards them, its passenger door flapping open.

Magda grabbed his wrist. ‘Pen.’

He found a chewed-off Bic in his pocket; she scribbled a phone number on the back of his hand.

‘She said her sister was in a, I think she said, dislocated state . When she met some people at the Rollright Stones. They’re nice , she said. The people, not the stones . I remember that.’

Cindy swung the car between the trees into the drive, almost scraping a Land Rover parked under a willow tree’s browning umbrella.

‘You need to know about the Rollrights, Bobby? I shall-’

A memory had kicked Maiden in the head at the sight of the Land Rover. He was in another passenger seat, a woman in a blond wig driving.

‘Cindy, stop … let me out. Half a minute.’

The Land Rover’s doors were unlocked. Maiden jumped in, rummaged around. Ordnance Survey maps, a thick paperback guide to stone circles of the British Isles, much thumbed. A hand lamp, pair of wellingtons and … He found the recorder wrapped in sacking underneath the driver’s seat, a cassette inside it, half wound. He slipped the cassette out, took it back to the Morris.

‘Ah …’ Cindy pulling sluggishly away before the passenger door was shut. ‘Rather hoping, I was, that you wouldn’t find that one.’

‘How do you know what’s on it?’

‘I think that he wouldn’t be able to rest — would not be free of the Green Man — until it was done. Out of his system. The other one he recorded in the rain, before he left the scene, presumably.’

‘Sure,’ Maiden said quietly. ‘It’s also occurred to me why he may have done this. How it came about. Why he killed Em.’

‘Perhaps you won’t need to hear it then.’

‘Put it on.’ Maiden said.

When the Green Man started speaking, it was deliberate, unhurried, a voice full of an awful, calm, precise, relentless certainty.

… the energy at Black Knoll is having a most interesting effect on the woman. She is clearly reluctant to enter the precincts of the burial chamber. She stands there, her unruly blond hair pushed down by a cap and by the rain, and then all at once she cries out .

‘ Oh come on, you’re fucking crazy! ‘

She begins to sob … standing on the Knoll, soaking wet and sobbing … before at last going to sit on one of the flat stones in the short avenue approaching the chamber itself .

The stones amplify her thoughts…

… so that the Green Man, lying snugly, invisibly, betwen two gorse bushes, knows at once that she is crying out for release .

It’s really quite astonishing. She has walked the line precisely, from the clearing, from stile to stile, the old sacrificial path. She has walked through the darkening rain, this woman who has crossed an ocean to present herself to the Earth .

And to the Green Man, Her servant, Her lover .

The woman whispers, ‘Ersula? ‘

And rises, screaming ‘Ersula!’ into the rain .

It is all that the Green Man can do to restrain himself from leaping to his feet in euphoria at this joyful union, across the Veil, a union which cries out to be complete .

How, then, should he facilitate the completion of the union? With his hands around the tender flesh of her throat?

Yes, she is begging now for deliverance. Her hands are clasped, she is swaying, her breath coming faster, in great gulps. The Green Man feels his fingers pulse. He begins to rise from the bracken, in his majesty .

And then, all at once, she rears up, her arms wide .

‘ Oh God,’ she whispers. ‘Oh … God . ‘

And then turns and runs away, taking the castle line, looking over her shoulder, once, as if to say, Follow me, follow me!

‘Oh, Grayle,’ Cindy whispered. The voice broke off and there was only the sound of breathing in the night.

‘This is when she saw whatever she saw,’ Maiden said. ‘And then came running down to the Castle, looking shattered.’

‘Though not as shattered as perhaps she would have been if she had known how close she had come to death.’

It is dusk when the Green Man returns to the castle, in his vehicle this time, driving into a field and parking, without lights, behind a hedge almost opposite the entrance .

When the woman was taken into the house, earlier, he was baffled. Was it to be done here? And what of the man? Him too? It occurred to him that now, in the absence of the old witch, the castle would at last be fully open to him…

Cindy stopped the tape. ‘Mrs Willis, you see. He could not have killed with Mrs Willis present. And now she’s dead he demonizes her, he calls her a witch.’

‘Why? Why couldn’t he … with her around?’

‘He perceived too much power around her, too much light? I don’t know.’

‘But you said he killed her . ‘

‘And now I am unsure. We do know that he drew her out in the only way that would work. He approached her and asked her for healing. The one thing Mrs Willis could not deny him. This gift she believed she had received from the Holy Mother at High Knoll. She could never refuse healing, see? Couldn’t refuse at least to try. Thus are saints martyred.’