The Cold Calling

sleep that night.’

They were through the city now, back in the dark country.

‘So why didn’t you feel like that, Bobby? Breaks ma heart.’

The other side of Hereford, small signs were saying Michaelchurch, Craswall, Longtown. Tiny, scattered lights from windows in the sky. Hill country.

‘I feel I’ve been ungrateful,’ Maiden said. ‘You wasted your … light.’

‘Get lost. There’s always a reason for things. Did I ask you what you believed, Bobby? If you ever believed there was stuff out there?’

‘Yeah, well …’ Through the windscreen, Maiden saw a church steeple greyly smoke-ringed with low night cloud. ‘I used to believe all kinds of stuff. Once.’

‘When you were gonny be a painter?’

‘Yeah. Not many coppers believe. Like doctors. Like how can any kind of a just God allow this shit …?’

‘I’m a cynic, Bobby. And a sceptic. I take a lot of convincing. Years of seeing good human beings die prematurely and bad human beings keep on recovering. I have no answers. And yet …’

‘Truth is I’d love to believe all that,’ Maiden said. ‘Be nice to be that kind of person. New Age cop. But my experience of being dead ties in only too well with the kind of deaths I’ve been seeing for years. Cold, ugly … to be avoided.’ He sighed. ‘To be avoided.’

At the end of the village street, a muddied sign said: Capel-y-ffin. Mountain road, unsuitable for heavy vehicles.

‘Nearly there, son,’ Andy said. She was thinking of how, when she talked to Marcus yesterday, he said Mrs Willis told him she had seen a black light. Over the Knoll.

That would make sense to Bobby, all right. With his experience. Black light.

In the headlights, the whitened bone-branches of two half-dead trees locked horns over the road.

XVII

Never needed an alarm; he awoke at six, precisely, to the bloody second. Always woke at six, from the days when he was employed to force-feed Shakespeare sonnets to gluesniffing thugs.

So, when Marcus fumbled on his glasses and the luminous clock said 4.55, he knew there was a problem.

Had hardly any sleep. Didn’t get to bed until half past one. Sitting around waiting for the Anderson woman — seriously, who could you rely on these days? — and worrying about Mrs Willis, who’d gone to bed early after two hours sitting alone in her Healing Room and not — here was the clincher — not even coming out for The Archers.

Another crash. Thunderous but familiar. An October gust thrusting at the barn door, slamming it back and forth — what happened to the new padlock and chain? One day that door would blow off and there’d have to be a gaping hole for the duration, because he couldn’t afford to replace it. Whole bloody fabric was coming apart, rot setting in, and the farmhouse would collapse a bloody sight faster than the original castle.

Felt he was under siege in his own ruins, the motte a tiny island in a Falconer sea, foundations eroding. The whole of the western world turning into a Falconer society: glib, superficial, arrogant, narcissistic.

Bastards.

The barn door went again, this time with a faint splintering coda, as though it had been hit by a team of men with a battering ram and they were backing off for another go. It must have sprung completely open.

In the dark, Marcus pulled his trousers from the bedpost (never be caught without your trousers) and his tweed jacket from the bedroom door, hauling it on over his string vest. Creeping in his socks down the stone stairs — although there was little danger of awakening Mrs Willis, state of her hearing these days — and stepping into his wellies by the back door, Malcolm ambling through to join him.

The cold hit him with a surprisingly vicious punch. Be winter before you knew it. Seemed no bloody time at all since last winter, the way the years just flashed by. But, then, why shouldn’t they? A year was nothing. Sixty years were nothing; what could you learn in sixty bloody years? What had Marcus Bacton learned?

Bugger all of any real significance. ‘Just has to be more than this,’ he told the dog. Grabbing his torch from the hook in the porch, stumbling into the yard.

The barn door blew out at him as he reached it, almost knocking him over. Bastard. Looked like the bloody chain had snapped. But when he pointed his torch at it, he saw the chain hanging loose from the hasp, the padlock still dangling from the chain … and the bloody padlock was open.

What the hell? Couldn’t be a burglar or a tramp looking for a bed, unless it was a tramp with the skill and patience to pick locks, and the door was so rotten anyway that he could have kicked his way in quicker, and … Good God!

Marcus saw that the key was still in the padlock.

The keys to the buildings were all kept in an old coffee tin on the kitchen window ledge.

Oh my God.

Mrs Willis.

Andy swung the car sharply right into a bumpy track, between outstretched arms of stone.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a castle, Bobby. Did I no tell you he lived in a castle?’

Something huge and tubular was pushing out of a bushy mound into the charcoal-grey pre-dawn. Half of a stone tower.

‘Well, he lives in it inasmuch as the walls are all round the house,’ Andy said. ‘More a liability than anything, with the upkeep and the official inspections.’

Behind the ruins, the headlights had found a low house, heavy with oak timbers, small, irregular black windows. Andy parked about fifty yards away. ‘We’ll bide here a while. Don’t want to set the dog off. Marcus’ll be about soon enough.’

‘Get some air, I think.’ Maiden pulled down his eyepatch, levered himself out of the car. It was chilly, the darkness rattling and squeaking. His body aching. There were no visible lights, apart from a fading moon and a single star.

Andy joined him. ‘How you feeling?’

‘OK.’

‘I bet.’

‘No, really. Better.’

‘You’ll sleep fine here. Air’s like rough cider. Listen. I have a thought. This may be stupid.’

‘Go on.’

‘It’ll take us no more than twenty minutes to walk to the Knoll.’

‘You don’t think that’s stupid at all,’ Maiden said. ‘You’ve been planning it all along.’

Only a barn owl shrieked in reply. He found himself losing touch with the reality of it, the scene receding into a small screen of pebble-glass, the kind you saw in front of vintage TV sets from the 1950s.

He saw a sliver of gold in the east. In the west, behind the castle’s bush-bristled mound, dark hills.

* * *

Halfway up the rise, he turned to look back into the east. Saw the dawn like an estuary in the sky: flat banks of cool sand and spreading turquoise pools. But he knew there was something wrong: it was just a pretty picture, he wasn’t feeling it.

‘You OK, Bobby?’ Andy moving briskly through the dew-damp field, looking back at him. He was out of breath; she wasn’t.

‘I’m OK.’ He could feel the excitement in her. Couldn’t believe that she believed his survival was down to some kind of prehistoric magic.

Andy shook her head over the view. ‘Will you look at that?’ She had on a blue nylon jacket, pink jeans and a pair of walking boots she kept in the car. She looked loosened up, very much at home here. ‘I mean, isn’t that just