The Cold Calling

William Rufus. Now known to have been a ritual death. Did you read up on that, Marcus, as I suggested?’

‘God almighty, woman, I haven’t even had the bloody time to think about it. We’ve had a death, in case you-’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I was just pointing out that when the king’s body was put upon a cart and taken to Salisbury, his blood was said — this is in the account by William of Malmesbury — to have dripped to the ground the whole way.’

‘So?’

‘A line of blood, Marcus. Murray, in her book, points out that this was obviously an impossibility but that it is consistent with the belief that the blood of the Divine Victim must fall to the ground to fertilize it.’

‘So how do the others fit into this pattern? Nobody else was shot with a damned crossbow.’

Cindy shrugged. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t appropriate. My feeling is that he works intuitively. For instance, there would, to him, have been a poetic justice, a holistic justice, in the gory death of one of the motorcyclists who destroyed the Monks’ Trod in mid-Wales. Decapitated as his machine is rushing along the sacred road, spraying out a line of blood in the slipstream. The fact that it didn’t work out like that-’

‘Equally,’ Maiden said, ‘it could have been some mindless rural vigilante. Or a farmer fed up with the noise. Or an angry rambler …’

Cindy tossed him a curious glance. ‘You remind me of a friend of mine, a certain Chief Inspector Hatch.’

‘Ha!’ Marcus said.

‘Look,’ Maiden said carefully, ‘The police are not thick. But when manpower and money are tight, they tend to stick to procedure. If there’s anything in this idea, they’ll get around to it.’

‘After a few more deaths.’ An edge to Cindy’s voice now. ‘When he’s killed again and again and become careless. The problem with the police is they always look for the prosaic solution first.’

‘That’s because ninety-nine per cent of crimes are not committed by subtle people.’

‘A serial murderer’s mind is never a simple mechanism, Bobby. They are open to strange influences, see, especially now, approaching the millennium. Psychological profiling is primitive and hopelessly inadequate. Think how many apparently motiveless murders are later accounted for by the perpetrator hearing voices. ‘

‘Most of them only remember the voices after they’ve been nicked. At which stage, a psychiatric hospital often seems strangely preferable to the lifers’ wing.’

‘Never mind all this psychological bollocks,’ Marcus said irritably. ‘What I’m totally failing to bloody see is how you can conceivably link this nonsense with the natural — certified natural — death of the old lady we’re about to bury.’

Maiden shuddered.

‘Yes …’ Cindy leaned back into the sofa cushions and sighed. ‘The truth is I can’t. Not yet. That’s why I’m here. I suppose that any death linked to an ancient site is, for me, at the moment, a suspicious death, and when you told me on the telephone … Well, a few things fell together.’

‘What bloody business is it of yours anyway?’

‘Perhaps I, too, am hearing voices,’ Cindy said sadly, and Marcus finally lost patience and leapt up from his chair.

‘You’re bloody mad! You’ve just come here to try and make something out of the tragically natural death of a bloody good woman! You’re as half-baked as Miss Pinder and her bloody ectoplasm! You’re as unhinged as the old bat from Diss with the fairies in the fucking greenhouse!’ Marcus’s hands clenched. ‘Excuse me.’

‘He’s had a lot to cope with,’ Maiden said, as the study door slammed.

‘So have you, by the look of it, lovely. Still got an eye under there, I hope. What is it you do, Bobby?’

‘Painter. Pictures.’

‘Well, there’s interesting. Make a living at it?’

‘One day, maybe.’

‘Otherwise, you’re between jobs, is it?’

‘On the sick,’ Maiden said. ‘Road accident. What do you do, Cindy? When you’re not investigating serious crime.’

‘Oh, a jobbing thespian, I am. When I can get the work. And an entertainer when I can’t. Comedy.’

‘And this is all part of your routine, is it?’

Cindy’s piercing eyes glittered. ‘Don’t believe any of it, do you, lovely? You think I’m an old stirrer.’

‘I just think all you’ve got is a theory. You’ve no evidence at all. You don’t seem to have any possibility of getting evidence. Also, there’s the problem that ley lines haven’t been proved to exist.’

‘Ah, so you do have some knowledge of these things, then.’

‘We’re not all thick and prosaic.’

‘Artists?’ Cindy said blandly. ‘I never thought they were.’

Damn.

‘Well,’ Cindy said, ‘you may argue that the existence of leys has not been proved to the satisfaction of scientists, but I, in turn, would argue that this is irrelevant. All that matters, see, is that he believes. He is killing people on what the maps and his own intuition tell him are lines of earth-energy.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, Bobby, I could give you a dozen convincing explanations, each one dependent on the killer’s own conception of earth-lines and the uses of ancient sites. If he believes leys are spirit-paths, perhaps he feels he is releasing the spirits of his victims to stimulate the energy-flow. Perhaps he sees them as sacrifices. Perhaps he feels he is himself absorbing the energy of his victims.’

‘I just can’t hear it in court, somehow.’

Cindy leaned towards him, with a waft of lavender. ‘I tell you, Bobby, compared with the rippers who hear voices and Charles Manson, who believed he was in psychic contact with the Beatles, this person is utterly and coldly rational, according to his beliefs.’

More wheels in the yard brought Maiden to his feet.

A coffin passed across the window. He recoiled. The inside of his mouth felt instantly dry and rough. The hearse reversed and three-point-turned in the yard, under the broken castle walls.

He was aware of Cindy watching his reaction with great interest.

‘You’re trembling. Don’t like funerals, is it?’

‘Who does?’

‘Love them, we do, in Wales. You fascinate me, Bobby. You must’ve seen any number of corpses in your line of work.’

‘I’m not that kind of painter,’ Maiden said.

Cindy laughed. ‘Oh, Bobby, so cautious. Talk to me, lovely, you know you want to.’

The hearse waited under the window, a man in a black suit got out. Cindy stood up and moved to the door. ‘Shall we bring the old lady in for a moment? Lay the coffin on that oak table in the hall?’ Cindy looked back at Maiden from the doorway and raised a surprisingly heavy eyebrow.

Maiden flinched.

‘I just have dreams. Since this road accident. About what it’s like to be dead.’

‘Oh?’

‘After the accident, I was dead for over four minutes. They brought me back.’

‘My,’ said Cindy.

‘That’s all it is.’

‘All? That’s a very big thing to happen.’

‘Not as big as murder,’ Maiden said. ‘How could the old girl possibly have been murdered?’

‘What brought on the stroke?’ Cindy said. ‘That’s what we should be asking.’

Maiden thought about black light and said nothing.

‘There are more crimes in heaven and earth,’ said Cindy, ‘than will ever be recorded on police computers.’