The Cold Calling

Fucking Falconer.

Marcus smacked a fist into the ground and badly grazed a knuckle on a protruding tree root. His eyes watered. He bound the hand with his handkerchief, called Malcolm and trudged back to the Castle through the thickening rain.

The grey-pink ruins were draped around the farmhouse, which was built on the edge of the original motte. Half of a tower stood next to the house, like a smashed grain silo.

Most of the castles in the area were reduced to this. No great kudos to owning one, unless you were an outrageous self-publicist like Falconer. The Listed Buildings people were always on your back … and the tourists, idiots who simply couldn’t believe that there could be medieval castle ruins not open to the public.

So when Marcus saw, from a distance, the vehicle parked in the shadow of the outer curtain wall, his hackles rose faster than Malcolm’s. He was in no mood to explain to some cretinous family that no, there wasn’t a bloody ice cream stand.

However, the vehicle under the wall turned out to be a Land Rover, which suggested a local person. Possibly a patient. The Castle was remote enough from the village for most of Mrs Willis’s patients to come by car.

Or it could be the doctor. Well, God knows, he had no time for these bloody state-registered drug-dealers, especially after their fumbling failure to save Celia. But the local fellow was less offensive than most and, after all, you didn’t have to go along with what they prescribed.

Perhaps Mrs Willis had seen the sense of it. Healer, heal thyself wasn’t always the best philosophy.

Stepping into the hall, he heard voices from the Healing Room. Must be a patient; Mrs Willis wouldn’t embarrass the doctor by having him examine her amidst her pots and jars of natural potions. Dammit, she wasn’t fit to see patients. But what could you do? What could you do with Mrs Willis?

Marcus tramped into the kitchen, dumped the kettle on the Rayburn. She’d laid out his mail in a neat pile on the old pine table. He hooked out a wooden chair with his foot. Phone bill and two letters from Phenomenologist correspondents. He recognized the cramped handwriting of Miss Pinder, the crazed spiritualist from Chiswick. The other was a foolscap envelope, postmarked Pembrokeshire. Sure he knew the writing, but he couldn’t quite place it. He sighed and slit the envelope with a butter knife.Dear Mr Bacton,Well, it’s been some months since you’ve heard from me, but I’ve been away. I trust you are staying out of trouble with the Ancient Monuments people over the state of your castle. Perhaps I shall see it one day. Now, I know you are a busy man, so I shall contain my Celtic urge to gabble on, and come straight to the point. There is a pressing matter with which I hope you may be able to assist me. We have a murderer in our midst.

What the bloody hell …?Now, there’s melodramatic, isn’t it?But before you dismiss it, in that delightfully brusque way of yours, as delusion, please peruse the enclosed cutting.

Oh God. Marcus closed and opened his eyes. Cindy the bloody Shaman.

Reached for a mug with his left hand, holding the shelf in place with his right.

Insane theatrical biddy who lived in a caravan in Pembrokeshire.

Only the word delusion kept him reading. Falconer had used deluded in connection with the blessed Annie Davies. Hate to think that anyone — even Cindy the bloody Shaman — might have cause to consider Marcus Bacton as small-minded as Falconer.… and so, naturally, I was most distressed by young Maria’s death and would have been only too relieved if the police had identified some local yob as the perpetrator of the crime. Yet it was clear to me from the first that it was not going to be so easy. I could not stop thinking about the death of William Rufus, as explained so well by Dr Margaret Murray in her wonderful book, which I am sure you have on your shelves…

Of course. Classic work. Murray had identified William as the Divine Victim. A king dying for his country. The ultimate human sacrifice. But only Cindy the Shaman could equate the historic slaying with the murder of a hunt saboteur some eight hundred years later.… here, I felt, was a killer with a strong sense of earth-ritual, and the only proof I required — for myself — was evidence that this person had struck again. I began to monitor the newspapers, searching for any death that could be strongly linked to its location … crimes committed in places of ancient significance. Wherever I travelled, I scoured the local papers for details that the national press would not have the space to include. I came across the attached report in the west Wales edition of the Western Mail.

Marcus unfolded the cutting.

BIKE BOY MAIMED IN HORROR TRAPA 14-year-old boy was in hospital with horrific facial injuries last night, after riding his motorcycle into a brutal, barbed-wire ‘man trap’ on a lonely mid-Wales hilltop.A police investigation is under way to find out who stretched a double strand of the wire between a fence post and a tree across a track regularly used by motorcycle scramblers. Schoolboy scrambler Gareth Wigley rode round a blind bend and directly into the wire. Surgeons are fighting to save his left eye.A Dyfed-Powys Policespokesman said, ‘He is very lucky to have survived. This was a calculated attempt to maim or even kill.’Some local people have protested that the ancient track, in the Elan Valley, near Rhayader, is being destroyed by weekend scramblers, and the injured boy’s father, farmer Bryn Wigley, 48, said, ‘Some of these so-called conservationists are completely insane.’The track, said to have been used by medieval monks walking between the abbeys of Cymhir and Strata Florida …

The last lines were highlighted with what looked suspiciously like yellow greasepaint.

Between the text and a photograph of the angry father holding a strand of barbed wire, the Western Mail had provided a little map, showing the exact location of the trap, on the edge of an oak wood. A line had been drawn across it in black eyebrow pencil, and Cindy had scrawled, Get out your OS maps, Mr Bacton. All right, nobody dead this time, but if it had been a grown man on that bike, the wire would have had his head off, no question.

The tin kettle shrieked on the stove, just about echoing what was going on in Marcus’s head. Was he really supposed to print this creepy woman’s fantasies? The Miss Pinders would think The Phenomenologist had metamorphosed into the bloody News of the World.

With the noise of the kettle, he almost missed the discreet creak of the Healing Room door across the passage. Dived to the door just in time to spot the young chap with tousled, tawny hair — moving pretty damn silently for someone with such a hefty physique — trying to creep out unseen.

‘Bloody hell. ‘ Marcus was out of his chair, the school-master in him exploding to the surface. ‘You! Boy! ‘

The outgoing patient stopped.

‘Come here,’ Marcus demanded.

The face came round the kitchen door looking stupidly embarrassed.

‘Ah. Mr Bacton. It’s you.’

‘Who the fuck you think it is? This is where I live.’

‘Ah. Yes. Course it is. Sorry.’

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing in my house? Sent you to spy, has he?’

‘Well, actually …’ Adrian Fraser-Hale, Falconer’s resident boy scout, shuffled about in the kitchen doorway. ‘I came to consult Mrs Willis. I have this sort of skin problem, and the lady in the pub said-’

‘Skin problem? Fucking thick skin problem, if you ask me!’

‘No, it’s a sort of psoriasis.’ The boy turned sideways and pulled his collar down, revealing an area of pink and white blotches. ‘From the ear to the top of the neck. Itches frightfully.’

‘God save us.’ Marcus raised his eyes to the worm-ridden oak beams. The rash was probably the remains of adolescence. Young Fraser-Hale had the body of a man and the air of a sixth-former — the sort who was a natural captain of the first fifteen but lacked the dignity to make head boy.

‘Actually, Roger doesn’t know I’m here. I don’t suppose he’d be awfully pleased. I mean, I’ve been to the doctor and a couple of chemists, and they all go on about allergies and elimination tests which could take, you know, yonks. Meanwhile the thing just grows, like some sort of alien lichen, and, well, Roger wasn’t too keen on me appearing on the box looking like this.’

‘Oh good heavens, no, mustn’t have anyone epidermically challenged on the Roger