The Cold Calling

day.’

‘You be careful,’ Amy said.

And somehow this wasn’t the same as You Take Care Now, which was just another way of saying Have A Nice Day. Jesus, it was just too easy in this place to get into the state of mind that made everything appear sinister. Grayle carried her case to the baby Rover, parked out in the village street.

Brakes screamed. A big, green Land Rover pulled up lower down the street and then reversed until it was alongside Grayle’s hire car, the driver’s door swinging open before it stopped.

Adrian Fraser-Hale jumped to the ground.

‘Grayle?’

‘Oh. Hi.’

Adrian stood in the middle of the road. He looked severely startled, his haystack hair all mussed up. Maybe the way she’d looked when she saw what she saw in the rain at Black Knoll. Or maybe just normal, for Adrian.

‘What … what are you doing here, Grayle?’

‘I’ve been staying here. And now I’m leaving.’

‘Staying … here?’

Uh-oh. It didn’t support the cover story too well, did it? Hardly the kind of joint normally frequented by New York journalists on assignment. Not that it mattered any more.

‘Local colour,’ Grayle said. ‘You stay in a big hotel, you don’t get the same local colour.’

‘Colour,’ Adrian said. ‘I see.’ He had on a green army-type sweater with patches at the shoulders and elbows; there was a camouflage fishing hat in his hand. He looked kind of cute and jolly and vaguely out of it.

‘Which is why I’m going to the Rollright Stones,’ she told him. ‘I figured, like, a New Age wedding … you know?’

‘Great fun,’ Adrian said. ‘Great fun. Which is why … I mean, I was looking for you, actually. We said we’d go together, didn’t we?’

‘Uh, right.’ Well sure, kind of cute, but two more hours of this heavy-duty, hearty Englishness when you had a lot on your mind … ‘Just, uh, as you see, I just checked out. That is, I won’t be coming back.’

‘That’s all right. Actually, I … Well, I was actually rather hoping you could give me a lift to Rollright. I’ve got two iffy tyres on this thing and the engine’s sounding more than a bit ropy. Fine for shunting around the lanes here, but I’d be rather anxious about the motorway. I mean, if you wanted to push on somewhere afterwards, that’s no problem.’

‘You mean, go in this?’

‘I can easily get a lift back with someone. Look, if you want to leave soon, I could zoom down to Cefn, toss a few wedding sort of clothes in a bag, be back here in no time at all.’

‘Isn’t Roger going?’

‘Oh gosh, you’re joking. Nice people, but not Roger’s type. I mean, you know, having them on the summer courses is one thing …’

‘And taking their money.’

‘Quite.’ Adrian looked uncomfortable. ‘You won’t print that, will you? Golly, I’m so indiscreet.’

Grayle smiled. ‘OK. How about I follow you down to the centre, get your stuff?’

‘Super,’ Adrian said. ‘I’ll buy you lunch somewhere.’

‘That’d be real nice.’

And maybe it would.

A single red circle had been drawn on the 1:50,000 Ordnance Survey map (Sheet 161 — Abergavenny and the Black Mountains) spread out on the desk, and Cindy tapped it with his fibre-tipped pen.

‘This is your Collen Hall, see?’

The name spelt out in Gothic lettering.

‘Which suggests a site of antiquity,’ Cindy said. ‘Now, if we consult The Buildings of Wales, we find that Collen Hall is actually built on the site of a Norman Castle, destroyed during the Glyndwr rebellion in the fifteenth century. And the castle motte itself may well have been constructed around a prehistoric burial mound. Agreed, Marcus?’

‘Seems feasible.’

‘Indeed. So you see, Bobby, we have a site of considerable antiquity. Now if we look around for other evidence of ancient occupancy of this area, we find … ah … this is the rather phallic Neolithic stone outside the army camp at Cwrt-y-gollen … you see the recurrence of that name … Collen mutates to gollen in the Welsh. Probably a reference to the Celtic saint, Collen. Anyway a connection. All right, let’s follow the line …’

Cindy encircled more spots on the map and then laid a perspex ruler along them and drew two straight lines.

‘Caer suggests a hill fort or enclosure. Often a holy hill, a place of veneration. The lines tend to cut across an edge rather than go through the centre. Cam is a cairn or mound, usually Bronze Age. And if we continue the line past Collen Hall we come to Llanwenarth Church, which I should imagine is quite ancient.’

Maiden peered down at the map. ‘What you’re saying … this is a ley line, right?’

‘And here’s another one connecting a cairn, another caer, and passing through Collen Hall itself to the very summit of the Sugar Loaf, which is the highest mountain in the area. Now, Bobby, do you see the way I’m thinking?’

‘God, Cindy, what am I supposed to say to that?’

He wanted them to go away. He wanted to sit here and look at objects and hear sounds.

‘Humour the creature,’ Marcus said. ‘He’s been praying to his own peculiar gods that one day a policeman amenable to his ideas would be sent to him.’

‘True enough.’ Cindy smiled coyly, nibbling the end of his pen.

‘All right,’ Maiden said.

He straightened up. Said the most detective-like words he could think of.

‘What’ve we got?’

Going over again why he’d had to dump his first theory about the two scumbags sent to the flat in Elham.

Because, while these insects would cut and dice a copper any night of the week, for enough money, they would never, on pain of slow castration, harm Tony Parker’s daughter. They might tail her to find Maiden, but they’d wait until she’d gone before they did the necessary.

No way would they follow them to Collen Hall — maybe going in via the public bar before closing time, unlatching a window for later — with a view to doing the job on the premises. Unbelievably risky.

And awkward. The hotel rooms were self-locking from the inside. The obvious way would be to tap on the door, cough politely, announce yourself as hotel management come with clean towels, fresh soap, whatever. And then, when it opens, you come in fast and hard.

And noisily.

Dangerously unprofessional. And you leave covered in blood.

Besides which, whoever it was had gone in after Maiden had left the room to make himself an easy target in the grounds.

Which raised the unthinkable: that Emma Curtis was the intended victim. Putting Maiden in the frame. A setup.

Too complicated. Too many potential pitfalls between arrest and a life sentence.

Surely.

The only other solution was Cindy’s. A killer concerned less with the victim than the location.

‘A human being,’ Cindy said. ‘Not a supernatural force. Not an energy. An ordinary human being.’

‘Yeah, but does he know that? Because this is the thing with serial killers. They don’t think they’re ordinary.’

Maiden inspected the map, in a cursory way, focused, but not concentrating.