The Cold Calling

standing back.

Come on, son.

More like fifteen years ago, maybe more. The wee nurses collecting like starlings, Andy shooing them away, but she could sympathize; he was a nice-looking boy was Bobby Maiden.

Young coppers: one of the first things they learned as probationers was where they could grab a hot cocoa on the cold nights. And a wee nurse for the night off.

Those days, Bobby looked too young to be out at night on his own. Made his cocoa last. Didn’t want to go back, you could tell, and always looked apprehensive. But, still, cute and bright some nights … and prey to Lizzie Turner. Clever, ambitious Lizzie. Not his type, but you never knew.

‘Come on, Bobby.’ Andy’s hands either side of his head, fingers down the cold, mud-and-blood-flecked face. Backing off as the paddle threw another seismic shudder into his chest.

‘We’re not getting anywhere, Sister.’

‘Go again, Jonathan.’

Lizzie Turner and, by then, Detective Constable Bobby Maiden. She’d missed the glittering wedding — somebody had to hold the fort. Down the pan now, anyway, Lizzie working in some BUPA clinic in Shrewsbury, they said, and living with one of the suits. A better cut of suit in a BUPA clinic.

‘Jesus God, Bobby.’ Andy closed her eyes, the big light over the table making a warm orange globe inside her eyelids, like the sun at dawn. Like the morning when Marcus and Mrs Willis took her to Black Knoll, told her how the sun had come down for the wee girl after the First World War, Marcus saying craftily that it sounded like a classic UFO encounter to him and Mrs Willis smacking him on the arm.

‘We’re wasting our time, Sister Andy,’ Jonathan said. ‘Three minutes gone? Three and a half?’

‘Keep going!’ Come on, Bobby, you cannae go out like this, son, covered in shit, stinking of whisky. This was the routine that never became routine; each time it knocked you back like the bolts jolting the person having his death invaded.

Another electric punch. The shudders going up both of Andy’s arms. It was a brutal business, but that was modern medicine: hit them with something mindless and powerful … drugs and violence, this was the modern manpower-saving Health Service — street-level stuff. Incredible she should be thinking like this, but Andy was remembering the laying-on of Mrs Willis’s hands later that morning back at the farmhouse and for nine more days, on a diet of greens and windfall apples and water from the well. This was when, after thirty years faithfully wedded to a hospital, something came through that turned into an itch.

‘Nothing.’ Jonathan’s voice as flat as the monitor. ‘He’s got to be over the vegetable threshold now anyway.’

‘No. Don’t stop, OK?’ Taking it personally, as always, but tonight it was all the more intense because maybe there wouldn’t be many more of them before Sister Andy dropped out to join the burgeoning ranks of the alternative healers, to dangle from the lunatic fringe, dispensing a laying-on of fragrant hands to well-heeled cranks who’d come to St Mary’s because it was prettier than a rundown spare-part warehouse like this place. And what was the alternative health sector, what was it really, but another small business leeching off the soft in the head?

Jesus God, which is right?

‘We’ve done all we can, Sister.’ Jonathan’s hands over Andy’s, trying to detach them from Bobby’s head. But the amber sun was rising behind her eyes and its heat rushing all the way down to her hands, to the tips of her fingers in the corpse’s blood-stiffened hair.

‘She’s upset, Doctor.’ Debbie Barnes sounding amazed at this, as if she was watching the Titanic going down.

Cold. The boy was long gone.

And the sun in her head turned suddenly black and she shuddered, head to foot.

‘No! ‘ Andy cried aloud, tears coming.

This was when the great roar went up.

IV

Once, just after dawn, the sun had come down for Annie Davies.

This phenomenon occurred early in the last century, on Midsummer’s Day, which happened to be her birthday.

It also took place on High Knoll.

Which was fair enough, as far as Marcus was concerned. Which actually, in fact, made perfect bloody sense.

However, what was upsetting was this: had it occurred almost anywhere else around the village, Annie Davies might, by now, have been some kind of saint. And the village a little Lourdes.

This was how Marcus Bacton saw it, anyway. Hoping, as he stepped out of the castle ruins and set off across the meadow, that the Knoll had a little inspiration to spare for him. That simply being there, in the energy of dawn, might somehow resolve the pressing question of what to do about Mrs Willis, his housekeeper, his best friend, his doctor.

Who, possibly, was dying.

Who might, in the end, require the nursing home she’d always sworn she’d never enter.

But who, if it came to it, he’d carry to the bloody Knoll.

It had taken Marcus years to piece together the story of young Annie Davies and the midsummer vision. Interesting, the way the village’s collective memory had filed it away under Don’t Quite Recall.

Bastards.

‘Come on then.’ Marcus walked more quickly, afraid the sun was going to beat him to the top. Getting on for seven a.m., and there was already a blush on the hill where the mist was thinning.

‘Come on. ‘

About twenty yards away, Malcolm, the brindle and white bull terrier cross, raised his bucket head briefly and went back to whatever dead and rotting item he was sniffing. A couple of sheep watched him uneasily.

‘All right, you bastard. Get your balls blown off, see if I care.’

Problem being that the Williams boy, who leased the grazing from the Jenkins brothers, could get difficult about dogs upsetting his flock. Even Malcolm, who despised sheep even more than he despised Marcus.

Eventually, the dog grudgingly ambled over and down they went, through the meadow and up the pitch towards the Knoll, until the already reddening field lay below them like a slice of toast tossed from the mountain.

And Marcus looked down, as he always did, and tried to see it as it must have looked to Annie Davies.

Wouldn’t be able to, of course, because he was now sixty, and Annie had been thirteen — by just a few hours — on the morning of her vision, in a world still recovering from the Great War.

The unheralded marriage of Tommy Davies, a farmer well advanced in years, to the local schoolmistress, Edna Cadwallader, must have provided a year’s worth of gossip for the drama-starved inhabitants of St Mary’s.

Annie was Tommy and Edna’s only child. Born ‘prematurely’, as they used to say in those days.

Amy Jenkins (related only by marriage to the Jenkins brothers, owners of the meadow, the Knoll and another hundred acres), who kept the oldest village pub, had told Marcus that her own mother used to say it was ‘a bit of a funny family’. As schoolmistress, Edna had considered herself Village Intellectual. She was a parish councillor, too, and would spend most nights at one meeting or another, putting the community to rights. And so Annie had grown up closer to her aged father.

Marcus often imagined — as if it had really happened this way — a strange, still atmosphere on the night before the vision — Annie brewing a pot of strong tea for her dad and the two of them taking a mug each and wandering companionably down to Great Meadow, watching the hayfield turn almost white in the deep blue dusk.

Thirteen, is it now? The cooling mug must have looked like a thimble in Tommy Davies’s huge, bark-brown hands. Big age, that is, girl. Sure to be.

Annie’s father probably didn’t talk a great deal. He would have been as old as most of the other village