The Cold Calling

If Fraser-Hale was here, there wasn’t going to be much of an element of surprise, but advertisement wouldn’t help.

Something inside him started quivering like a very thin wire. Trepidation. He’d never seen Adrian Fraser-Hale, only his blood-washed leavings. Trepidation, where there should have been hatred. He wondered how his dad would handle this. Wondered what had really happened the night Norman Plod took on Harry Skinner and his lads in the old paint warehouse at Wilmslow.

The daft things you thought about when you were terrified.

Aw, come on, he’s just a guy.

Just a guy who killed and killed and killed again and was never even suspected to exist because his motivation was beyond the accepted parameters of criminal behaviour.

Out of the darkness, out of the old stones, the Green Man spoke.

‘Hullo there?’

‘Sheet lightning showed him leaning over the railings: flop-haired, boyish.

Maiden didn’t move.

‘Don’t come any closer, will you, old chap?’ the Green Man said. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it. Rather tense tonight.’

Maiden didn’t reply. The darkness settled back around him like a security blanket. He couldn’t believe the voice. Together with the flash-image, the voice — so clear in the still, taut air — had brought up a ludicrous picture of some cool young World War Two airman, leaning against his Spitfire, smoking a pipe and wondering, in a desultory way, what Jerry had up his sleeve for tonight.

‘Except you might stand up. Quite like to take a look at you next time there’s a flash.’

So Fraser-Hale couldn’t see him, didn’t know how close he was. Perhaps had heard him moving across the field. Hadn’t seen him in the lightning.

Which made him seem less of a threat, less of a fine-tuned, hawk-eyed, all-sensing Stone Age stalker, half man, half Will o’ the Wisp woodland sprite.

‘So let’s have you on your feet, shall we? See who you are.’

Maiden said carefully, ‘Who do you think I am?’

Barely a pause. ‘Someone the woman told I suppose. Made a mistake there, but we broke down in the wrong place, you see. Engines are man-made. Imprecise. I can’t be doing with things I haven’t made myself.’

‘What woman’s that … Adrian?’

‘Oh … blond hair. American. Someone’s sister.’

Green Man Psychological Profile: when they lost their identity, became ‘the man’, ‘the woman’, it meant they’d been consigned to the mental file marked Sacrificial.

‘You mean the place you broke down, it would have been wrong to kill her there? Nowhere near a ley, or a sacred site?’

‘Who are you?’

Maiden kept his voice steady. ‘I’m your shadow, Adrian. I was with you in the New Forest. Under the pines near Avebury. And last night. At Collen Hall.’

‘Who are you?’ Plain curiosity.

‘It doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t know me.’

‘No,’ Adrian said. ‘It certainly doesn’t matter to me. For the moment.’

‘But we know you. Quite a few of us.’ Tip the scales a little; make him feel exposed, analysed, possibly surrounded. We’ve been watching you for quite a while.’

‘With what purpose? To learn?’

Bloody hell, the arrogance.

Think.

Remembering, while he was with the Met, being sent on a siege-negotiators’ course. Not the full course, a weekend primer, play-acting. Learning to relate to the hyped-up nutter at the upstairs window holding a blade to his former girlfriend’s throat, the fugitive on the eleventh-floor balcony with the baby. Keep them talking. Become a friend, the only friend they’ve got.

The course had been short on advice for dealing with a passionately motivated assassin perfectly at home among Neolithic stones with a storm on the way: his ideal killing situation, but you didn’t know quite who he was planning to kill or quite when or quite how, only how he’d killed the others, no specific MO — apart from being governed by earth-forces which might not exist outside the labyrinth of his mind.

Maiden rolled onto his side. Over to the right, there was a tiny, twin glow. The candles on the wedding altar, over four hundred yards away. Were the people all still there? Had they moved away, leaving the candles?

And don’t, whatever you do, put yourself between the circle and the Knights.

‘Adrian,’ he said. ‘The thing is, you’ve quite impressed us. We don’t think there’s ever been anyone precisely like you.’

‘Then you must be pretty stupid, if you think that. There was a time when everyone was like me.’

‘Hunting?’

‘Hunting to live. Living to hunt. Feeding the organism, feeding the Earth. The great energy cycle. It’s the big secret.’ Adrian laughed, a full-bodied ha ha ha sort of laugh. ‘Killing makes the world go round.’

‘Terrific.’

‘What did you say?’

For once, Cindy was wrong. The storm might be a psychological trigger, but he wasn’t expecting the storm to do his killing for him. Too random. The Green Man liked to be in full control. The Whispering Knights was a perfect, strategic observation post, a little island. Was he waiting for someone here? Would someone be sent, like the birdwatcher? Had Maiden fallen into that role?

It wasn’t enough.

Pull him out of the abstract. Tie him down. A name.

‘I gather Roger Falconer’s been using your ideas.’

‘Ideas?’

‘Well, you know what I mean.’

‘We were going to write a book together.’

‘That’s what he told you, is it? You and Roger, both names on the front?’

‘Not sure. Not sure he deserves it.’

‘Worried he might rip you off?’

A pause.

‘Rip? I may rip his throat out. I may give him to the Knoll. Have to leave the Knoll something when I go. Could be Roger. What do you think?’

Talking to Maiden as someone who, having studied the Green Man, was expected to grasp the point.

‘Where are you going, Adrian?’

Pause. ‘Who did you say you were?’

‘You wouldn’t know me. My name’s … Robert.’

‘You’re right. I don’t know anyone called Robert. What do you do?’

‘I’m a painter. Like Turner.’

‘I don’t know much about art.’

‘But you know what you like. And you like the picture of Stonehenge. In the storm. That’s a Turner.’

‘No!’

‘Yes …’ Watch it. ‘No. Sorry. Must be thinking of another one.’

‘Don’t be stupid, I know which one you mean. The lightning, called into the circle. And the sheep waiting to die for the Earth. And the shepherd. One of the world’s greatest works of art. A message. From the Earth. I mean, it doesn’t matter who daubed the paint on; it’s a spiritual work, a coded message to mankind. They’re all willing sacrifices. I mean, for heaven’s sake, a shepherd knows when there’s a storm coming. A shepherd on Salisbury Plain — and I was born near there — he knows to avoid the stones, because, when it happens there, it’s going to be a big one. I mean, not now, perhaps, because Stonehenge is pretty useless now, with all the tourists, but then … when was that painted?’

‘About 1820?’