The Cold Calling

children’s grandfathers. So when he made a pronouncement it would be charged, for Annie, with a glowing significance, like the words of an Old Testament prophet.

Thirteen. Marcus saw her grinning up at Tommy Davies, laying her mug on the grass and, with a rush of coltish energy, clambering over the wooden gate and dashing off down the track dividing Great Meadow, with the first breath of the night billowing her cotton frock almost over her head. The beginning of the parting, and Tommy too old and experienced not to accept it.

Perhaps the image of Annie had become inseparable now, for Marcus, with the last picture of his own daughter, Sally, who had died of leukaemia within months of her own thirteenth birthday. Perhaps this, in truth, was what had made him so determined to get Castle Farm: the feeling that something of Sally was here, too. That if he’d known about the vision when she was dying he would have brought her here. To the natural shrine which the Church had denied.

Soon, what seemed like all of south Herefordshire was at Marcus’s feet, the crimson line of dawn drawn tight over the misty, wooded hills, cleft only by the stocky church tower of St Mary’s.

The church was built on the site of a Celtic hermit’s cell. It was probably older than the woods and the fields. For Marcus, the hills around the Golden Valley hid the lushest, richest, least-spoiled countryside in all of southern Britain. The villages had altered hardly at all, and St Mary’s was probably not so very different from when Annie was here. In those days, it might even still have been known by its original Welsh name Llanfair-y-fynydd: St Mary’s in the Mountains.

The village itself, viewed from above, seemed almost circular, in its nest of wooded slopes. From the churchyard, you could look up and see the long, dark ridge of the mountains, but the eye would always be drawn back towards a single promontory which seemed to punch the sky like a dark, gauntleted fist.

High Knoll. Or Black Knoll, as it was called in the village and now, to Marcus’s disgust, even on the maps. When you got there, it wasn’t so stark, although the grass was brown and rough around the stones.

The burial chamber on the Knoll was far older than the church and even older than the Celtic hermit’s cell. Annie Davies would have been told (by her mother, at the village school) that it was where heathen folk once came to worship the sun. Ignorant people who thought the sun was a god.

Perhaps Annie had been dismayed. Perhaps, whenever she’d tried to imagine God, she, like Marcus, had thought at once of the sun, the brightest light in the sky. Wondering if that made her a heathen?

Perhaps, as she walked up to the big, broken table of stones, she’d decided that the prehistoric people couldn’t have been so very ignorant if they could find such a perfect place to greet the day. And anyway, Jesus hadn’t been born then, so how were they to know about the true God? They were worshipping the brightest light they knew; what was so wrong about that?

Tommy Davies, who wasn’t well educated but was doubtless very wise, might have told her that the people who built the monument were his ancestors, the first farmers here. And that having the bits of old stones up there somehow kept the land in good heart.

The burial chamber had been partially collapsed for centuries. It was unlikely that even Annie would have been able to get inside. Perhaps, that morning, she had clambered on top of the chamber, the huge capstone, and turned to watch the daily miracle of the sun trickling out of the horizon. And lifted her face to the sky.

Was that when it had happened?

About a hundred yards from the Knoll, along the steepening track of stones and baked red mud, Marcus had his first tantalizing glimpse of the top of the capstone.

Just about make it in time for the dawn. Even more than three months after midsummer, the view of the dawn from High Knoll was never a disappointment.

And then he heard voices.

What?

On the Knoll? Voices on the Knoll? At dawn? Marcus felt violated. He stiffened, snatched hold of Malcolm’s collar, clamped a hand over his muzzle.

Accepting he had no right to feel like this. Wasn’t Castle land any more, although it was Marcus’s ambition — if, for instance, there was a sudden upturn (ha!) in the fortunes of The Phenomenologist — to buy it back one day. However, the elderly, reclusive Jenkins brothers, whose father had acquired the Knoll as part of a land package in the late 1940s, seemed to accept the footpath as a right of way, for the owners of the Castle, at least. On this understanding, Marcus laboured up here at dawn twice a week, summer and winter. And in all that time he’d never met a soul, except for the intense American girl that one occasion, and at least she’d had the bloody decency to consult him first.

Because, at the Knoll, the dawn was his time. His and Annie’s and Sally’s.

There was a clump of rowan below the summit, and Marcus crept between the trees, marching Malcolm ahead of him, and waited and listened. A man’s voice was drawling in that rhythmic up and down way that told you he wasn’t really talking to anyone he could see.

‘Now, this is a fairly unexceptional chambered tomb, dating back over four thousand years. We can’t get into the chamber any more because, as you can see, it’s collapsed in the middle. Of course, what we’re looking at here are merely the bones of the structure. Originally, all this would have been concealed by tons of earth, and all you’d have been able to see was a huge mound, with an opening … just … here. Now I say it’s unexceptional … except … for one aspect. The location.’

There was silence for about half a minute. Marcus seethed.

‘How was that, Patrick? We could run some music under the bit where we open up to the dawn spectacle. Do you think? What’s that da da thing from 2001? Or is that a bit of a cliche?’

‘No, it might work. Roger … Just another thought. When I pull back, but before I open it out, if you were to stand fractionally to the left …’

‘How far? This?’

‘And back a bit. Hold it there. Spot on. What I was thinking, if we time this right, do it just as it’s breaking through, it’ll look as if the sun’s rising out of the top of your head. Nice effect. What do you think?’

‘Hmm. Yes, OK. Why not? Worth a try.’

‘Make a change,’ Marcus said loudly, coming out of the trees, ‘from it shining out of his fucking arse.’

He hauled himself up onto the small plateau of the Knoll. Where there was hardly bloody room for him. The molten orb in the east turning five faces florid as they all spun at him.

Young Fraser-Hale looked startled but otherwise unperturbed. The haughty Magda Ring said, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake,’ and slapped her clipboard like a tambourine. The cameraman swung round, aiming his lens at Marcus like an assassin with a rifle. The sound man resentfully snatched off his headphones. And Falconer …

Falconer just smiled.

‘Marcus,’ he said.

Falconer. In his fur-trimmed motorcycle jacket and his ridiculously tight jeans. Falconer who strode the hills with his ponytail swinging, followed by a string of adoring acolytes: the old ladies he charmed, the young ones who — by all accounts — he shagged senseless.

‘One realizes, old chap,’ he said, ‘how terribly fond you are of this place, but we are working and, as you see, space is somewhat limited.’

Falconer, with his weekly television audience of an estimated six million.

Marcus with his ailing private-subscription magazine, circulation just under eight hundred and slipping.

His aversion to the man couldn’t be as simple as that, surely?

‘If I could just point out …’ the cameraman said, looking agitated, ‘that we’re going to have about four minutes, maximum, to get this shot before the sun goes behind a frigging cloud or something.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Falconer said. ‘Our friend just wandered up for a teensy snoop, and now he’s leaving. Aren’t you, Marcus? Old chap.’

Old chap. Always a slight emphasis on the old.

‘As a matter of fact, no.’ Marcus flicked back his heavy, grey hair and straightened his glasses. ‘I don’t think I am.’