The Cold Calling

‘I’m out of here,’ Grayle said aloud.

She wouldn’t spend too long at the wedding. Tonight she’d check into a good hotel, where the rooms had phones. She’d take a long, hot shower then spend a small fortune calling home. Call her dad, who, for all she knew, had news of Ersula. Call Lyndon McAffrey. Maybe she could get a new column someplace, and one thing was sure, it would be a different kind of column; it would deal with the same stuff, but this time it would be responsible, it would recognize this was serious stuff. Stuff that could screw up a person in a big way.

Adrian was waiting out in the parking lot. Beyond him, fields of light green, cottages and barns of golden stone under the whitewashed October sky.

‘Super,’ he said.

Asshole.

She looked into his bland, smiling face and saw the other face. The face with meat fibres in its teeth. Dream- junkie. Fanatic. He was immature, this was the problem. He hadn’t learned how to live in the real world.

Jesus. Here was Holy Grayle thinking this?

‘What should we do, then?’ Adrian looking at her across the car, chin resting on folded arms on the red roof. ‘Should we go straight to the stones and acclimatize ourselves, or join the others in Chipping Norton?’

‘Maybe I need to change. My clothes. I oughta check out what the others are wearing.’

‘OK. You’re the driver. Chipping Norton it is.’

When they were on the road, he said, ‘I say, look I’m sorry for getting so … preachy.’

‘Oh. Well. I, uh … it was all fascinating stuff, Adrian. Really.’

‘I get sort of carried away.’

‘It’s enthusiasm, is all. People today, uh … not enough people have enthusiasm. It’s become a very bored society.’

‘Do you think so?’

‘Sure. Folks just staring at the tube for hours. Listening to the same old Guns ‘n’ Roses albums.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a band, Adrian.’

‘Oh.’

‘You aren’t into music?’

Adrian considered this. ‘It’s unnecessary. It diverts us. Stops us listening to natural sounds. If we pollute our ears with music, we can’t hear the Earth breathe. My father listened to Mozart all the time when he was at home. Blaring through the house. You couldn’t think. Worse now he’s retired. Believes he needs to educate himself on the finer things of life. What does your father do?’

‘He’s uh, he’s an academic. At Harvard. Didn’t Ersula talk about him, ever?’

‘To Roger, I expect.’

‘Yeah, well, Ersula can be kind of hurtful sometimes. She doesn’t mean to be that way, she’s just a little impatient of, uh …’

‘People who weren’t as brainy as she was?’

‘I guess. I’m sorry. This included me, too. To Ersula, I was just … just crazy Grayle … and she’s younger than me.’

‘Brains aren’t everything. She needed to find her spiritual side, she knew that. She did recognize that I could help her in that direction.’

‘She did?’

‘Thought at first that she could get what she needed from Roger, but I showed her how wrong she was. How utterly wrong.’

‘How did you do that-Hey, what’s wrong here? I’m losing … What’s wrong with the car?’

Loss of power. Keening noise.

‘Don’t rev it like that. Pull in. Pull in here.’

‘What’s that noise mean?’

‘Better switch off.’ Adrian opened his door. ‘Do you know how to loosen the bonnet?’

‘Huh?’

‘To get at the engine.’

‘You wanna look under the hood? You know what you’re doing?’

‘I’m a practical sort of chap,’ Adrian said.

They came back out the front way. As Maiden followed Magda towards the small Gothic door in the side wall, a venerable Morris Minor creaked into the forecourt.

‘Who on earth is this?’ Magda said, strained. ‘I’ll get rid of them.’

‘Don’t do that, it looks like the local CID chief. It was, er, politic to bring him in. Case like this, the local guys need to be seen holding your hand.’

‘In that thing?’

‘You never watched Columbo, Magda? Afternoon, sir.’

Cindy strode towards them. Strode. He was wearing slacks and a blazer and something that might have been an old school tie. His hair was slicked back, the mauve area so faint it might have been an effect of the light.

‘This is Detective Superintendent Lewis,’ Maiden said, very slowly and clearly. ‘Sir, this is Ms Ring. She’s in charge here in the absence of Professor Falconer.’

‘How are you?’ Cindy turned to Maiden. His voice had deepened and seemed to have acquired a coarse London accent. ‘Sincerely hope this isn’t a waste of my time, sunshine. Got an armed blag in Hereford on me plate already this morning. Plus a floater in the Wye.’

Maiden said to Magda, ‘Would you excuse us a moment?’ Cindy followed him into a corner of the forecourt, under trees.

‘Not overdoing it, am I, Bobby? Played a detective in The Sweeney, in the seventies. Shot dead before the first commercials.’

‘And not a minute too soon,’ Maiden said bitterly.

‘I shall temper my performance. Good of you to make me your superior, Bobby.’

‘It was your age. Listen. We’re going to hear some audiotapes of ancient-site dreams recorded by one Adrian Fraser-Hale. If they answer any of your Green Man questions, try not to show it. You might also have to look at a body.’

‘Oh dear God.’

‘An American woman. Ersula Underhill. Grayle’s sister?’

Cindy closed his eyes briefly. ‘I wish I could say I was surprised. She was killed?’

‘And buried inside the concrete helipad, round the back.’

Cindy winced.

‘On a ley line,’ Maiden said. ‘As it happens.’

‘Yes,’ Cindy said heavily.

… and the smell … No, I don’t suppose the smells are stronger as much as the air itself is cleaner and keener. One can smell smoke from … oh, miles away. One can see, in the air, all around, a rainbow of colours, although far more than a rainbow, and each colour is represented by a smell … the auras from different kinds of vegetation and wildlife … and stones, rocks. The rocks are very much alive. There’s distant smoke. And blood. The blood is the keenest, sharpest smell of all and it’s coming from … I think it’s a chicken or something. Killed by a fox, I expect…

‘Are they all like this?’ Cindy said.

‘More or less.’ Magda Ring flipped the tape out of the machine. There were scores of cassettes on metal shelves above the tape decks in the Portakabin. The spine of each plastic box had a reference number.

Bobby had stopped talking as soon as the voice began and he hadn’t spoken since. Something was disturbing him; the poor dab probably could not identify it. Although he’d be closer, after last night, much closer.

It was not a particularly dramatic voice. Educated, to a point. Certainly well brought up. Amiable, but bland in itself. There was a zest here, but it seemed relatively innocent. The enthusiasm of a trainspotter. But still … the voice of the Gloucester mass-murderer Frederick West was, apparently, matter-of-fact and almost jovial about his