The Cold Calling

‘I’m no talkin’ about the police. All right? Y’understand what I’m saying? This is bad guys, Marcus. Won’t take no for an answer.’

Marcus was suspicious. ‘How can you possibly know about this?’

‘Doesnae matter. I know. This is no a scam. These people, they won’t want any witnesses. That means you, Marcus. This is very, very bad guys, y’hear me?’

Marcus pondered a moment.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘I get the message.’

‘Thank Christ. Act on it. I’ll call back in ten minutes’ time, I don’t expect an answer.’

Anderson hung up.

Marcus didn’t move for a whole minute. He looked out of the window at the empty yard. The castle ruins firm against a white sky. He remembered how excited it had made him feel when he first saw it, when he realized the castle came free with the house.

From his inside breast pocket, he pulled the colour photo of his daughter in the deckchair. The sunglasses with diamante frames, too big for her.

Malcolm stuck his bucket head round the door and then wandered in, tail waving nonchalantly.

‘Wants us to get out.’ Marcus placed the photo on top of the picture of Annie. ‘Very bad guys.’ He went down on his hands and knees, put his nose up to the dog’s. ‘Very, very bad guys.’

Malcolm growled.

‘Englishman’s castle is his bloody castle,’ Marcus said. ‘Get out for good when I sell this place and not before.’

In the stable block, Maiden pushed at Adrian’s door.

‘You’re the law.’ Magda watched, a little hostile now, but made no attempt to stop him. ‘I suppose you can do what you like.’

The door was made of old pine boards. It wasn’t even locked. Maiden stepped back, let her go in first.

‘But I don’t know what you think you’re going to find.’ She stood in the middle of the small, wooden room, as if she knew she was by far the most interesting item in the whole place.

Which was true enough; conditions here would have made a Spartan recruit feel underpampered. Single wardrobe and a bed. No clock, no books. The bed had been stripped to its boards, the mattress up-ended against a wall.

Maiden raised an eyebrow at Magda. ‘Some kind of fakir, this bloke?’

‘I didn’t realize it had gone quite this far. He spends so many nights on stones, his body probably revolts against an orthodox bed. Or he’s educated it that way, more likely.’

Maiden was going through the clothes in the wardrobe. Shirts and trousers — army trousers, tweed trousers, not jeans. One suit. He thought, It’s a soldier’s wardrobe. An old-fashioned soldier.

‘What’s his background?’

‘Small-time country-gentry. Military family. Hunting-shooting. Father’s a retired colonel, lives near Salisbury. Came over once. Nice man. Quiet.’

‘What did he do before he came here?’

‘Some form of youth-worker, I think. VSO, perhaps. He’s just a big boy scout. I really don’t see why you’re doing this. Why aren’t you raiding Roger’s quarters? Too influential, is he? Too well connected?’

‘Actually,’ Maiden said, ‘difficult though it may be for you to understand, that really doesn’t worry me a lot right now. But, if Ersula was murdered, she was probably murdered while you and Falconer were away. Which leaves Adrian in the frame. Where was he last night, do you know?’

‘I don’t see him come and go. I have a three-room apartment in the granary across there, and it has nice, thick walls. I mean, he was around, I assume. Messing in his workshop, up at the Knoll, doing his EVP tapes. He’s always around. ‘

‘EVP?’

‘Electronic Voice Phenomena. Recording so-called spirit voices. Some people claim to pick them up between stations on the radio. Adrian left cassette recorders in ancient sites. He says you can sometimes hear voices.’

‘Like the Yorkshire Ripper heard voices?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘All right. You said Falconer got his ideas about hunting generating energy and feeding the earth and all that … from Adrian.’

‘Through Adrian, I ought to have said.’ Magda sat down on the wooden bed-frame. ‘Through his dreams.’

‘His dreams?’

‘Keeps tapes of all his dreams at ancient sites. He’s become so practised at it now, he doesn’t need anyone with him. Wakes up promptly at the end of a dream and talks it into a recorder. Sometimes — increasingly, in fact — he has, you know, prehistoric dreams. He’ll dream about tribal rituals and ceremonies and sacrifices and-’

‘Sacrifices?’

‘All kinds of things. Sacrifices were part of life then.’

‘Human sacrifices?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t listen to them. I mean, Roger was deeply cynical at first. Then he began to see information and descriptions that Adrian couldn’t possibly have learned from books … not that he ever reads. He hardly ever reads anything any more. And yet, possibly because he’s such a simple soul, he seemed far more in tune with Stone and Bronze Age thinking than Roger could possibly be. I don’t, you know, think Roger believes he’s getting psychic messages or anything like that. But the points he makes seem to gel. Trigger off ideas which somehow germinate into programmes. There’s going to be a book, too, on the mind of Neolithic man. That’s an ongoing thing.’

‘But you don’t listen to these tapes.’

‘I listened to a couple. I didn’t like them much.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know, it … it was somehow like listening in to one of these sex chatlines. A sort of … gloating tone. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t like Adrian. I have to work with the guy. It’s bad enough working for Roger.’

‘Why do you stay?’

‘Because I was divorced and not too well off and now I’ve been able to buy a lovely town house in Hay, which I shall move into quite soon. And because we’re producing some wonderful TV programmes, and one day … one day, it’s … it was … really going to take off. The University of the Earth. That’s why we started with such an ambitious title. There’d be a lot of people working here … not just here, we’d have places all over the country. It wouldn’t always have to be so … intimate.’

‘Adrian ever make a move on you?’

‘God, no. Not connected enough. Has to be the full deep-and-meaningful for Adrian. And not deep and meaningful, necessarily, in the way you’d expect. Until Ersula, I don’t recall Adrian ever showing much interest in women. Some of the students were very interested, but he’s always the gentleman. I sometimes thought — this is strange — that he was more attracted — I mean in an almost erotic way — to the Earth. His idea of the Earth.’

A sharp, soily smell stabbed at Maiden’s senses, and he wanted to run out into the fresh air and keep on running.

‘Where does he keep his tapes?’ he asked her.

In the mirror in the pub’s ladies’ room, Grayle saw herself, really saw herself for the first time in what seemed like months.

She was shocked.

Tried to flatten down the bunches of hair. Jesus, this wasn’t a grown woman’s hair, this was goddamn teenage hair. Didn’t go too well with the puffy eyes and the lines. Lines? Were those lines? Back home, there weren’t lines; there were never lines back home. See, the hard lights in these British bathrooms seemed designed to condition you to the idea of your own mortality. You’ll die, the light on your face said. Sooner than you can imagine.